Monday miscellany

"Patents and value: a dialogue". The IP Finance weblog, in conjunction with the IPKat, is holding a fascinating event on Tuesday 16 September in the Holborn, London, office of EIP. This event is a dialogue between IPKat and IP Finance blogger Neil Wilkof and Intellectual Asset Management editor Joff Wild. The pair will be conducting a discussion, chaired by IPKat blogmeister Jeremy, on the impact of patent litigation on the value of patents and patent portfolios. Full details of this event, which is free to attend, can be found on the IP Finance weblog here.

Last Friday fellow Kat Eleonora posted a piece, "Uploading goal videos online? A copyright infringement, says FAPL. Is it?", here, which was perfectly timed to coincide with the first week of the new English Premier League football season.  Somebody must have liked this post, since it also ended up on leading English legal magazine Legal Week and was quoted on the Managing Intellectual Property blog and on Channel 4 News. Well done, Eleonora!

Around the weblogs. Mark Anderson, on IP Draughts, asks provocatively "Is it career-limiting to practise IP law?" SOLO IP's Barbara Cookson takes a look at written complaints procedures in the regulated environment of solo practice.  Responding to Efrat Kasznik's guest post on the financial (non)reporting of intangibles last week on IP Finance, Janice Denoncourt offers her own thoughts on how company law can be brought to bear on this topic. Over on Excess Copyright, Howard Knopf reflects on whether the "less is more" philosophy of a Calgary radio station might not be raising some interesting moral rights problems, inter alia.

Selfie poll. The 1709 Blog's sidebar poll on copyright in selfies taken by monkeys [this is nothing to do with SurveyMonkey, adds Merpel] is doing very nicely, thank you. With two weeks to go, the poll has already attracted 178 responses, an impressive figure for any holiday-time poll.  If you have not yet participated, please do!  At the moment, most readers are inclined to think that there is no copyright at all in the now-iconic self-portrait of the black-crested macaque -- but there's plenty of room for argument.

Alexandria Redskins

Redskins last stand? A number of readers have spotted that the Washington Redskins have filed a suit in a US District Court in Alexandria [that's the one in Virginia, not the big one in Egypt which is more closely associated with red skins ...], in an attempt to retain their controversial trade mark registration (reported in "Redskins defend name, ask federal court to overturn trademark decision", here, by Ian Shapira in the Washington Post).  This Kat's feelings on the subject have already been articulated in sufficient depth here: in short, he believes that, whether the trade mark is invalid because it is disparaging or whether it isn't, the brand is currently toxic and gaining in toxicity in the eyes of consumers and the time has come to replace it. According to Shapira:

"The Redskins are suing five Native Americans who won the headline-making patent case [naughty journalism: why can't they tell trade marks from patents?] on June 18, providing them with a largely symbolic victory in their fight to force the team to change its name. By suing in federal district court, the Redskins are asking for a chance to defend their name, which they contend celebrates Native Americans [Merpel thinks this is a little patronising, seeing as at least some Native Americans wouldn't have supported the name change if they thought the name was celebrating them]. “We believe that the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ignored both federal case law and the weight of the evidence, and we look forward to having a federal court review this obviously flawed decision,” said Bob Raskopf, trademark attorney for the Washington Redskins, in a statement. The team can now introduce fresh evidence into a battle that has been confined to the patent office and limited to mostly decades-old testimony. The federal district case also gives the team an extra chance to appeal in case it loses. If the Redskins had filed their case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, their appeal would have been restricted to old depositions and documents that have already been widely dissected". 

Aided no doubt by an army of Redskin-watchers on both sides of the Atlantic, this Kat will surely be kept informed of further developments and will seek to bring them to the attention of his readers.