Monday miscellany

No boring read. A Cheese of Some Importance found its way through this Kat's letterbox not so very long ago.  This cheese is actually a book, authored by lapsed trade mark attorney Mark R. Giesser, and it tells of the adventures of a patent clerk and his inventor sidekick in Washington DC shortly after the War of 1812 [that's this war, fought on US soil and presumably the fore-runner of the Ryder Cup.  It should not to be confused with the Battle of Borodino and Napoleon's subsequent retreat from Moscow in the same year, for which Tchaikovsky wrote the musical score]. The cheese in question is a commemorative cheese which is kidnapped and held to ransom.  Intellectual property lawyers who enjoy cheese-related adventures will probably be relieved to discover that the plot does not turn on the debate over whether cheese names are better protected as trade marks or geographical indications.  Non-lawyers will be pleased that this tome, weighing in at just over 200 pages, has large print and absolutely no footnotes.   You can read the review on Kirkus here and buy it on Amazon here.

"No Boring Day: IP Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Issues in Brazil" is the title of a public lecture by Gustavo de Freitas Morais (partner, Dannemann Siemsen) on 3 July at the the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, in collaboration with the Department of International Development, LSE. It's free, but you still have to register. Click here for all you need to know ...

No boring meal. The Law Society for England and Wales has indulged itself in its first ever Intellectual Property Law Committee (IPLC) Dinner, at which IP Minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe was the main course special guest. Also on hand were Sean Dennehey and Steve Rowan from the UK IPO and three of the four new recruits to IPLC: Michelle Blunt, Michael Hawkins and Duncan Ribbons. Together with Edward Nodder, these are the people you can now lobby when you want the Law Society -- which represents a huge phalanx of solicitors (there are nearly 118,000 folk holding practising certificates, it seems) -- to take a stance on any issue concerning IP law and practice. The IPKat is trying to get hold of the Baroness's speech for you, so hang on in there!

Calling patent in-housers.  Managing Intellectual Property magazine is running another survey on the current attitude of in-house patent attorneys to the emerging regime for unitary patents and a unified patent court for the European Union. You can find details of this initiative, and the reasons for it, from the PatLit weblog here. If, as a respondent, (i) you don't already have an iPad mini 3 and (ii) you actually want one, you can opt to enter your name in a draw for one. 

Around the weblogs 1.  This Kat was pleased this week to make contact with the CNCPI over in France. The CNCPI is the French Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys Institute; it represents some 1,000 professionals on French territory and its website appears to combine the functions of a news and information service and a blog. Both the IPKat and the PatLit weblogs got a mention there last week.  Meanwhile, on IP Draughts, Mark Anderson asks what some may regard as a rhetorical question: is the lawyer's task of drafting standard terms and conditions something that is undervalued by the client?  Elsewhere, the 1709 Blog carries what may well be Ben's last CopyKat post before the Glastonbury Festival overwhelms him, and there's also a short notice of an article by Michael Carrier on how reports of the death of musicians' income-earning opportunities in the wake of the new technologies may be premature.

50 Shades of Greys Inn?
the Injunction Blog logo

Around the weblogs 2. This Kat is happy to see that his friends and colleagues at Olswang LLP have been celebrating the occasion of The Injunction Blog's one hundredth blog post.  Sadly, this blog has to focus on injunctions in areas other than intellectual property law too, Be that as it may, the blog has 14 IP posts, plus another 13 in the media field.  The jiplp weblog happily announces the publication by JIPLP of its first Open Access article, which is freely available to all readers: the topic is how much you might be expected to pay in FRAND royalties in India. Reporting on Class 99, former guest Kat Laetitia Lagarde gives a decision-by-decision account of the Community trade mark litigation on genuine use and whether POLYTETRAFLON must be considered confusingly similar to the earlier mark TEFLON for identical goods (the answers so far are no-yes-no, with the prospect of a further appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union ...).

Great Narth Run.  The Great North Run, described by Wikipedia as the second largest half marathon in the world [Merpel doesn't get this. Surely all half marathons are exactly the same size, being one half of a whole marathon], is a very popular event with many folk -- but not with the inhabitants of a tiny village in Wales called The Narth.  The Great North Run Company, which owns the IP rights to the event, called in the lawyers in what is generally agreed to be a heavy-handed approach to dealing with major threat to its goodwill and continued survival posed by the Great Narth Run. This, says Merpel, is the sort of thing that gives IP rights a bad name. A Katpat goes to Chris Torrero for sending in this link.