Wednesday whimsies 1

Does the Baroness have
have the magic touch?

Baroness to fly.  The IPKat learned yesterday that the United Kingdom's Minister for Intellectual Property, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, is to visit that sadly-troubled entity, the European Patent Office. This is how Managing Intellectual Property magazine's Twitter account broke the news:

Managing IP @ManagingIP · 1h1 hour ago

Just interviewed Baroness Neville-Rolfe at #PatentForum2015. She is visiting @EPOorg next week, wants to find "a positive way forward"

This Kat very much hopes that the visit will be a constructive one, with a positive outcome, and that the Minister -- who does not have a background in patents -- will be sufficiently well briefed ahead of her visit to make it a valuable one for all concerned and not just an exchange of diplomatic cordialities. Maybe she has a magic touch which will do the trick, since the normal avenues of conflict resolution don't seem to have accomplished too much ...

A great money-maker

Now it's the turn of trade marks.  While governance of the European patent system continues to preoccupy many of us, MARQUES -- the European trade mark organisation -- has just fired off a salvo or two of its own in the direction of the effective functioning of the parallel trade mark systems for the Community trade mark and national or regional marks within EU Member States.  MARQUES has long been concerned with the financial issues arising from the fee structure of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM), an organisation that has proved itself to be very good at earning money which, for both legal and political reasons it finds pretty difficult to spend.  MARQUES's position paper on the current proposals, expressed with both clarity and dignity, can be read here. If you have any comments, MARQUES will be pleased to receive them.


Complaint Department.  Yesterday we announced that Dr Danny Friedmann (IP Dragon) had agreed to field complaints from readers who feel that their blogposts have been unfairly blocked by this weblog's moderation policy (see details in the side bar feature "Want to complain?" on the weblog's home page). Today we can announce that we have a second person to whom readers may make complaints -- Dennis Crouch (Associate Professor, University of Missouri Law School, and author of the Patently-O weblog). The identity or, where relevant, anonymity, of complainants will be respected.

Going so FAST! The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST)'s Legal Advisory Group -- a.k.a. FLAG -- meets next week on the evening of 18 March, in the House of Lords, London. If you are interested in attending, do please register either with FAST's General Counsel Julian Heathcote Hobbins at julian.hobbins@fast.org or, if you prefer, Sarah Gray at sarah.gray@fast.org, either of whom will happily send you a copy of the agenda.

Around the weblogs.  Fellow Kat Darren, together with his EIP colleague Robert Barker, write up the Idenix v Gilead litigation over whether a document cited as prior art in a patent validity dispute over novelty is entitled to its priority date, on the jiplp weblog here. The same blog carries a note by JIPLP editorial board member Charles Macedo, with three of his colleagues, on "trade mark tacking" and the recent US Supreme Court ruling in Hana v Hana. On the 1709 Blog, Ben records a US$ 25,000 hit in the pocket as the price for abusing the DMCA take-down procedure -- though most of it goes to the lawyers.