Wednesday whimsies

If you are involved in IP, bioscience and agriculture, having a surname like Berry is no bad thing.  Dominic Berry has alerted the Kats to the existence of Cultivating Innovation, and this is his big attempt to get people to help shape an agenda for his workshop this April by asking them what they might want to have on it.  This can be your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the course of history. More information is available via this link. Dominic and the Cultivating Innovation Team thank you in anticipation.

Around the blogs.  Michigan/California based US law firm Brooks Kushman is offering an IP Law Tracker blog. The content looks pretty US-ish so far, but there's no harm in that. Absinthe may make the heart grow fonder, but it can also spark off some Spanish trade mark litigation, notes Fidel Porcuna on Class 46 here. Barbara Cookson's recent SOLO IP post on Darts-IP and the fine-tuning of search options, drawing a comment from Sally Cooper that, while fellow Kat Neil lamented last week about the under-structuring of information retrieval in IP treatises, we might be facing problems of over-structuring too. Marty Schwimmer's Trademark Blog has an update on some procedural shenanigans relating to that troublesome REDSKINS trade marks again. Incidentally, Marty's blog has now passed the 5,000 post mark. If the comments section were open, this Kat would have posted a hearty Katpat on it. Over on the 1709 Blog, there's news of an event this Friday on Valuing the Public Domain, a festive survey on copyright literacy and Ben's first encounter with Facebook and its new terms of use.


This month's attractions. The Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property has now published its December 2014 list of forthcoming IP events, which you can check out here. There is a surprisingly large number of them. To add events of your own for the future, just tweet Pedro and his colleagues at @QMJIP #IPEvents with the details.  

Spanking infringers: not a form of copyright
education but a sign of its inadequacy ...

Copyright: the need for more education and awareness. Earlier this year UK Parliamentarian Mike Weatherley (Conservative Member of Parliament for Hove and Portslade; former Intellectual Property Adviser to the Prime Minister) published a report examining the advertising revenue on pirate sites [no, says the IPKat, this isn't one of the "alternative business models" that IP owners are constantly being urged to create in the internet era], has reiterated the need for a coordinated international approach to address piracy, pointing to the recent cyber-attack on Sony and the theft of numerous films before their theatrical release. Mike has published two other reports on IP issues: one on search engines and now a discussion paper on copyright education and awareness. Says the IPKat, awarding Mike a Katpat, it's good to see a Member of Parliament continuing to take IP issues seriously even though there aren't many votes to be gained from supporting IP protection. Merpel agrees: teaching people what copyright is about, what it allows, what it prohibits -- and why -- is surely a much better first course of action than waiting till people go wrong and then bombarding them with threats and punishments. 

Yum yum, says Idgie*

Via CBC News comes the proposition that Canadians are not filing as many patents as they used to, according to a study by the C. D. Howe Institute which was drawn to this Kat's attention by Chris Torrero (Katpat!)  The past decade has seen a noticeable decline, and would have been worse but for the sterling efforts of the inhabitants of Alberta and Ontario who have been pretty well keeping things going. However, Canadian production of maple syrup has doubled over the past two decades. Says Merpel, the obvious solution to the decline in Canadian innovation is to leave off the maple syrup ...

* Idgie the Cat is commended as the only blog that appears to link cats to maple syrup