Friday fantasies

Forthcoming events.  Several new events have been added to the IPKat's Forthcoming Events list this week -- do take a peep.  They aren't all in London, or even in England. The list is updated at regular intervals and often features events that are free to attend or that offer registration fee discounts to IPKat weblog readers.

Sidebar poll.  With just two days to go, the IPKat's sidebar poll [for those readers wo only read the email version of Katposts, the sidebar is on the left of this blog's home page] on the popularity or otherwise of end-of-year Season's Greetings email circulars shows that substantially more than 80% of respondents delete these missives unread. This doesn't mean that your vote doesn't count! Do take the time to participate: it takes less time to cast your vote than it does to delete a seasonal greetings email pat your cat ...

Coalition for Feline Prowess? This Kat's aversion to abbreviations and initials is well known: he avoids them when he can. It may not surprise readers to discover, then, that when he encountered the letters "CFP" at the beginning of the title of a forthcoming conference, he assumed that it was a short-form reference to a funding or sponsoring body, perhaps the Confederation for Patents, the Collective of Full Professors, the Coalition for Feline Prowess or the Centre for Privacy. It was thus with some embarrassment that he discovered that he was wrong and that the letters in question stood for something a little less grand: "Call for papers". The call in question relates to "Cultivating Innovation: How (and How Not) to Think about Intellectual Property in Agriculture and Plant Science", a one-day interdisciplinary conference coming up on 14 April 2015 at the John Innes Centre at the University of Leeds, England. Details of the CFP can be found here. Merpel, who knows all about John Innes, hopes that the event will prove to be an intellectually fertile one, and that such compost as may be present is confined to bags and not to any of the conference papers: you can however help to ensure the high quality of the presentations by offering to deliver one yourself ...

Around the weblogs. On IP Finance fellow Kat Neil asks provocatively, of corporate venture capital: "Is it good for start-ups? Is is good for patents?" Over on Class 46, guest blogger and Danish attorney Lasse Arffmann Søndergaard Christensen relates a surname-as-trade mark scrap between two of Denmark's 261,000 Jensens, while Nikos Prentoulis explains why the Greek trade mark registry wasn't keen to allow the registration of a figurative mark containing the words "Mafia Bastards".  On the 1709 Blog, "Freedom of Speech Baby!" is the debut blogpost there for recent guest Kat Marie-Andrée Weiss -- a post that also touches on copyright and Charlie Hebdo.  On SOLO IP this Kat has popped a short post on some possible problems that might arise where IP lawyers (or indeed any lawyers) opt for online client review software. Finally, on PatLit this same Kat notes, rather belatedly, an interesting decision on whether a defendant in patent infringement proceedings can resist an order to name its infringing customers on the basis that compliance with such an order would damage its reputation with them.

An 'Around the Weblogs Special' will be posted later today, looking at recent posts on three other weblogs in a little more detail.