Friday Fantasies

Jeremy entrusted me with the Friday Fantasies for this week, so here are a few items of interest.

Forthcoming IP Events:

Let’s go first to Paris; I hope you do not mind!

Légipresse, which is a monthly French magazine dedicated to communication and intellectual property law, is organizing a conference on October 2 titled “Are there lawful abuse to freedom of expression?” One of the panels will discuss parody and IP law, and lunch (déjeuner) will be served. The conference is in French.

IP Conferences in Paris
Are Very Exciting! 

Let’s stay in Paris to attend another conference, on October 14, this time organized by the Institut de Recherche en Propriété Intellectuelle (IRPI), about recent developments in French and European copyright law. One of the speakers will be André Lucas, Professor Emeritus of the University of Nantes, who is one of the authors of the seminal French treaty on copyright. My dog-eared copy is never far away from my desk.

In the U.K., The Law Society is offering a webinar on Digital currencies - what do you need to know? The webinar will take place on October 15, and will cover topics such as the nature of digital currencies (property or currency?), the common law position and the statutory position, the legal basis of a claim for stolen digital currency, and the tax treatment for such currencies in the UK.

In the U.S. A., the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO) is organizing a “National TrademarkExpo” on October 17-18.

I Should Not Have
Accepted That Gig...

The USPTO promises that the event will be “a free, family-friendly event [I shall hope so!] designed to educate the public about trademarks” and will include workshops and educational activities for children, including games and quizzes, exhibits featuring trade marks, displays comparing counterfeit goods with authentic goods, costumed characters and inflatables featuring trade marks, small giveaways featuring trade marks. Can you think of a better way to spend your weekend than mingling with characters disguised as trade marks? That should provide plenty of inspiration for your Halloween costume…

Around the Web:

Who owns jokes? is the topic of this week’s podcast on Life of the Law. Professor Christopher Sprigman, who teaches IP law at New York University is interviewed for this program. He explains that copyright is not used to protect jokes in the stand-up comedy community, rather, there are informal rules enforced by community actions. A very interesting podcast, where we learn there are virtually no copyright lawsuits over jokes.

Best dressed: as many of our readers are interested in fashion and its relationship with IP law, I will end  this post with a site I recently discovered, Europeana Fashion.  It features hundreds of thousands of pictures of fashion items from European museums.

As explained on the site: 

“Europeana Fashion is a best practice network co-funded under the CIP ICT-PSP program and composed of 22 partners from 12 European countries, which represent the leading European institutions and collections in the fashion domain. The consortium will aggregate and provide Europeana with outstanding and rich material about the history of European fashion, including more than 700.000 fashion-related digital objects, ranging from historical dresses to accessories, photographs, posters, drawings, sketches, videos, and fashion catalogues.”

The Europeana Fashion project started in March 2012 and will end in February 2015, so enjoy it while it lasts!

Thank you for reading this post, have a good weekend ya’all!