Friday fantasies

Nagoya in the news again.  "We need to talk about Nagoya", by fellow Kat Darren Smyth, has just been published in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry World; you can read it here.  If you are puzzled about the Nagoya Protocol, research, intellectual property, biodiversity and natural resources and are not a lawyer, this is a good place to start reading. As Darren explains: "It is the most high level yet due to a determined editor who would not let me put any legal detail in at all".

Around the weblogs.  A figurative mark consisting of the words "Yoghurt-Gums" was always going to be hard to register as a Community trade mark for confectionery and sweets other than chewing gum (Class 30), and Laetitia Lagarde's note on Class 46 shows exactly why. Over on the 1709 Blog, Ben Challis explains what happened in the US when a copyright-owning porn film company appeared to be doing the dirty work of copyright, er, collection society Prenda Law.  Here on IP Draughts Mark Anderson conjures up another curious topic for the delectation of his readers: how to manage ambiguity in IP transactions.

No room for lawyers? The last presentation yesterday at OHIM's IP Mediation Conference, by Fabienne van der Vleugel (Attorney-at-law Meaux, Brussels, New York Bars and Mediator, Vice President UIA World Forum Mediation Centres), escaped detailed coverage only because of lack of laptop power.  It was a stunning, dramatically delivered oration on the topic "Leave the Law outside the Door … Commercial Interests come first".  Fabienne graphically described the responses of lawyers to her request that, in the course of mediations, she speak to their clients without any lawyer being present. Responsible and experienced mediations recognised the need for this, while some others were shocked at the prospect of their client being exposed to a real live mediator without them being present; this latter category required intensive education from her, which could easily take an hour or two on the phone. Lawyers could be the biggest enemies of mediation -- but, when properly trained and with the right attitude, they could also be mediation's biggest friend: they still had a role to play, since it's not the job of the mediator to give the disputing parties legal advice, or indeed to sit down and draft any agreement the opposing factions reach.  As for the proposition that the law and its practitioners could be dispensed with, Fabienne's conclusion was that, while mediations must be driven by commercial rather than legal considerations, the law cannot be eliminated entirely. Her last words: "leave the law outside the door -- but don't close it" [if you missed yesterday's Katposts on the first day of the conference, you can read them here, here, here and here].

Would this have infringed a
Trunki line drawing?

Save our Trunki! A rallying cry from British designers.  A katpat goes to long-time reader Lee Curtis (Harrison Goddard Foote) for sending us this link to an article in The Telegraph which reports the launch of a Protect Your Design campaign in response to the recent Court of Appeal for England and Wales decision to allow the appeal of Hong Kong based PMS International against a ruling that PMS had infringed the Trunki children's case registered Community design. This article ties in nicely with the recent Katpost on David Stone's paper on line drawings, in which, citing Trunki, he argued that registered Community designs that were based on line drawings enjoyed a wider degree of protection than designs based on shaded or textured illustrations.