Monday miscellany

Forthcoming events. Do please remember to check out the IPKat's forthcoming events page. There's plenty of fascinating stuff on it, including events for which readers of this weblog are entitled to substantial discounts on their registration fees.  One forthcoming event that has just been added to the list is coming up later this month in Milan: it's all about limitations and amendments of patent claims in the course of litigation and you can read all about it on PatLit here.


The OHIM Academy is running a mini webinar which is a "Beginner’s module on Community Designs". This takes place on Wednesday, 11 June 2014, from 10:30 – 11:30, Central European Time, as previously announced in the Academy's training schedule for 2014. This mini webinar follows hot on the heels of last month's OHIM Academy's successful beginners' module on Community trade marks.  Says the Academy:

"We will continue with this format of short webinars aimed at our younger colleagues, in particular newcomers to National IP Offices, User Associations and OHIM, and those who work in non-IP departments and need to gain some basic knowledge on Community designs".

The main feature of this webinar is that it complements an earlier e-learning module -- the Academy's recently-launched "Community Design in a Nutshell". The webinar itself will be divided into two parts: (i) an overview of the Community design registration process, and (ii) a discussion forum relating to the information provided in the e-learning module and supported by examples of interesting cases. The course will be run by two OHIM experts, Dimitrios Andrianopoulos and Martin Schlötelburg. Details are as follows:
·       The webinar will be broadcast live here
·       There is no need to register for the webinar. Please feel free to share the link broadly among your members. The number of participants is not limited.
·      Participants are asked to complete the online course “CD in a nutshell”. This course is free of charge and available 24/7 here 
·       In order to enroll in the course, you'll need an account in the OHIM website. For those who do not have one, just follow the instructions here.
·       Finally, OHIM would like participants to submit their advance questions for the webinar’s Q&A part by 9 June 2014 (that's TODAY!). If they miss this deadline, they can still submit further questions during the live webinar. 
The necessary requirements needed to take part in the webcast are, as usual:

·       A computer or IPAD or IPHONE [naughty, naughty OHIM, says Merpel, IPAD and IPHONE are registered trade marks -- and you should know, because you've registered them, here and here]

·       An internet connection with a minimum of 300 Kbps (the optimal bandwidth is 500kbps).

·       An internet browser (Explorer, Mozilla, Chrome, etc.).

·       Headphones.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the OHIM Academy mailbox academy@oami.europa.eu with the the subject line "Webinar 11/06/2014".

What would Dickens have said? The Big Yellow Van v Rayner, a ruling of Judge Hacon in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court for England and Wales on 27 May, is one of those little judgments that never makes the law reports and doesn't find its way on to BAILII, not least because it appears to have been delivered extempore. However, it would be sad to let it vanish into oblivion for one small reason.  The action was for passing off, copyright and trade mark infringement and judgment was entered for the claimant in default. The defendant applied under r.13.3 of the Civil Procedure Rules to have the judgment set aside. However, the same rule requires that the defendant applying to set aside an adverse court order must not only show that he has good grounds for defending the case: he must also make his application to do so promptly.  Judge Hacon has held that an application made no fewer than 102 days after receiving the court order was not made "promptly".  Measured by the Dickensian yardstick of Jarndyce v Jarndyce a mere 102 days would have been virtually instant -- but things have happily raced on a bit over the 161 years since the final episode of Bleak House was published.

Around the weblogs.  Ben Challis's latest CopyKat post on the 1709 Blog, as colourful and informative as usual, leads with the latest news of the adventures of The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde. SOLO IP features an open letter from Barbara Cookson to the new leadership of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys and a list of likely calamities faced by medium-sized legal practices that may be either of concern or of complete irrelevance to sole and small IP practices. Meanwhile, Afro-IP's Kingsley Egbuonu posts Part III of his thoughts on the Nollywood/Hollywood/Bollywood trade marks.


The June issue of IP Connect is now out. This Kat can almost forgive the UK Intellectual Property Office the cardinal sin of publishing dire group photos of people in suits, photos which -- this Kat suspects -- are of little or no interest to any of the e-magazine's target readers, since it also contains a note on the latest news from the little-known but potentially valuable Tegernsee Group.  According to this note:

Patent experts? Or the crew of the Starship
Enterprise preparing to be beamed up ...?

"The Tegernsee Group has published its final consolidated report [144 pages, lots of useful data, here] on the Tegernsee user consultation. The report includes an analysis of individual office reports, including commonalities and differences in user views [Goodness, says Merpel, they haven't even said what the Tegernsee Group is and they're already rabbiting on about commonalities and differences ...]. The adoption of this report marks the end of an intensive cycle of fact-finding and user consultations that focused on four key issues of substantive patent law harmonisation: (1) the grace period (2) 18-month publication; (3) Treatment of conflicting applications and (4) prior user rights. The Tegernsee Group refers to those patent offices represented at a meeting in Tegernsee, Germany, in July 2011. The group has now concluded on the feasibility and implications of harmonisation for key offices and users of the patent system. The final report will shortly be presented to John Alty as the Chair of the Group B+, for presentation to that forum. The fifth and final Tegernsee Heads meeting was attended by delegations from the UK, Japan, USA, Denmark, France, Germany and the EPO and took place on 8 April 2014 in Trieste, Italy".