Friday fantasies

Take a punt on an a forthcoming event:
you won't regret it ...

Forthcoming events. As usual, the IPKat urges readers to take a look at his Forthcoming Events page and see if there are any upcoming IP events that take their fancy.  Many are free or offer discounts to readers of this weblog. Among the events added this week are IBC's annual IT Law Summer School, which takes place in August in the agreeable surroundings of Downing College, Cambridge. The same company's annual IP Summer School will be held there too, and details will be posted as soon as they are available: this Kat will be running a coexistence agreement negotiation exercise at that event, which should be fun.

Ryanair Chase. Listening to the radio yesterday, this Kat learned that there is an annual horse race, run on the third day of the Cheltenham Festival, which goes by the name of the Ryanair Chase. Apparently there are 17 fences to be jumped and there is a generous prize of £200,000 for the winner [though Merpel is quite puzzled as to what a horse might want with so large a sum of money, or indeed with any cash at all].  Having personally experienced the Ryanair brand at first hand, this Kat finds it difficult to whip up excitement for a race, or indeed anything else, that goes under that name. He has visions of air passengers being made to jump 17 fences on their way to a distant airline departure gate, and of jockeys being asked to pay a premium for a decent saddle. Since he has not flown Ryanair for a few years now, he wonders whether things have changed, and whether the brand now conjures up more positive images for its users than it did for him then. After all, the mere fact that Ryanair is paying out money rather than sucking it in can be taken as a positive sign. What do readers think?

Looking for a job? As the jiplp weblog reported earlier this week, IPKat blogmeister Jeremy, who is the founder editor of the Journal of  Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) and has been toiling away at it since 2005, will be retiring from that role at the end of this year and the publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), is already looking for someone to replace him.  The job is a demanding one, but it's also fun: you get to correspond with leading IP personalities from around the world, you have a chance to read -- and edit -- loads of articles and current intelligence notes before anyone else gets to see them and you also have the thrill of working with OUP, one of the world's oldest brands and a stickler for quality control.  Oh, and you also have the pleasure of working with several members of the IPKat blog squad (Eleonora, Darren, Birgit and Neil are all editorially involved).  JIPLP comes out monthly; it is supported by a formal website, a weblog, a LinkedIn Discussion Group and a Twitter account. Supported by a hugely impressive editorial and production team, as one might expect from OUP, JIPLP comes out in print, online and in mobile-enabled format, and it is an increasingly influential voice in professional, commercial and academic circles. If you feel that you can take JIPLP to the next level and relish a truly satisfying challenge, you can get further details here. But you'd better be quick: OUP wants to hear from you before the end of this month.

Aripiprazole 

Around the weblogs. The MARQUES Class 99 design blog reports, thanks to a guest post from Evelina Marchesoni, on another Italian ruling on design rights in vehicle wheels, the difficult relationship between complex products and component parts and the role played by assessment of the aesthetic dimension of the effect of an allegedly infringing product: unlike the earlier Italian case involving wheel trims (Case C-500/14 Ford, here), this one is not going to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling -- the court said so! Ben Challis has delivered another CopyKat copyright round-up, here, just in time for the weekend (thanks, Ben!)  Meanwhile, PatLit has a short note on what seems to be a bit of a non-event: the report that summarises responses to the UK government's call for comments and consultation on what changes, if any, need to be made to the UK's Patents Act 1977 to make UK law compatible with the operation of Europe's new (but not yet operative) Unified Patent Court. Finally the patent term extension-oriented SPC Blog notes a ruling on Otsuka's failed attempt to get a paediatric extension for aripiprazole on the ground that the Japanese pharma company had not met all the conditions for extension of the term before its supplementary protection certificate had already expired.

But will anything else do for OHIM webinars?

Naughty OHIM! This Kat has noticed in the past that, while his good friends at the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) are getting very good at examining Community trade mark (CTM) applications, weeding out the not-so-registrable ones and generally running the CTM system smoothly, they do have their blind spots. One relates to the promotional material which OHIM asked MARQUES out to prospective participants in its popular webinars on IP-related issues. The technical requirements for prospective participants are that they have "a computer or IPAD or IPHONE". This Kat is not impressed: does the fact that the words iPad and iPhone are in capital letters detract from the fact they are being used as generic terms for tablet computers and internet-enabled mobile phones respectively -- and who should know better than OHIM, which has granted CTMs to Apple for each of them (see eg Nos EU008817281 and 004748133).

Congratulations! This Kat enjoyed the hospitality of Managing Intellectual Property magazine at this week's banquet at the Intercontinental Hotel, Park Lane, to mark the tenth anniversary of the Managing IP Global Awards. To his delight, one of this year's two awards for outstanding achievement went to former Court of Justice of the European Union and Irish Supreme Court judge Fidelma Macken, with whom he used to teach law at Trinity College, Dublin back in the 1970s. To his greater delight, this year's award for IP in Ireland went to DFMG Solicitors, for whom Patricia McGovern was there to collect the trophy. Both Fidelma and Jeremy lectured Patricia at Trinity and were delighted to see that one of their star students had done so well.  Incidentally, it was a good night for Ireland all round, since the other recipient of the outstanding achievement award went to Simmons & Simmons' Kevin Mooney (though maybe it should have gone to Mrs Mooney after Kevin's kind words about her).