Tuesday tiddlywinks

The advantage of a furry face:
no-one can see you blush

Justia Blawgsearch. Via a post on the excellent Copyright Litigation blog ("All practice, no theory") this Kat read with happiness, excitement and not a little embarrassment that the IPKat weblog has come top in the Justia Blawgsearch list of the "25 Top Copyright Blogs of All Time".  

Once again the IPKat, Merpel and all the blog's contributors take the opportunity to say a big thank-you to their readers and information-providers and to the litigants, legislators, judges and consumers who have combined to make copyright what it is today ...

Matters arising 1. Earlier this month, thanks to Axel Paul Ringelhann, the IPKat announced the reference to the Court of Justice of the European Union of some Community trade mark questions relating to phonetic similarities between marks in Case C-223/15 Combit Software. The official English translation of those questions is now available and the UK Intellectual Property Office invites comments by 10 July 2015 which might persuade the UK government to make representations of its own. Details can be found here.


Matters arising 2. Yesterday morning the IPKat posted a guest article by Revital Cohen, "Is UberPOP a transport service? A new reference to the CJEU". Frustratingly the version of the article that was originally posted managed to de-format itself and almost all the hyperlinks vanished.  The article has since been repaired and the hyperlinks restored. You can now read it here while clicking to your heart's content. Apologies to all our readers -- and of course to Revital.

At sea with Oracle? Better than a coracle

Matters arising 3. Way, way back in December of last year the Kats hosted a guest blogpost from Thomas Dubuisson, "Oracle v Google: are certain elements of the Java platform entitled to copyright protection?" The US Supreme Court has just refused to hear Google's appeal. As Thomas explains, in Google, Inc. v Oracle America, No. 14-410 a petition for a writ of certiorari was finally denied since Google failed to convince the US Supreme Court to hear the case. It is a big victory for Oracle! As a reminder, on 6 October 2014, Google filed a petition asking that court to review the Federal Circuit's appellate ruling holding Oracle's asserted Java API declaring code to be copyright-protected. This saga, which already started four years ago, is still not over. The case is now sending back to the District Court in CA for a retrial on API under 'fair use'.

Most events offer refreshments ...

Forthcoming events. The IPKat's calendar of Forthcoming Events can be checked out here -- and it has some recent additions, so do take a peep. Additionally, the July events diary of the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property can be accessed here. One forthcoming event that this Kat is particularly excited about is the JIPLP-GRUR seminar on Tuesday 8 September on the enforcement of IP rights in the wake of the IP Enforcement Directive.  You can get all the relevant details by clicking here. It's free, it's fun and it's instructive. See you there?

Around the weblogs 1. The SiNApSE blog runs a "young intellectuals" feature, in which bright young IP talent is interviewed.  Six people have been interviewed so far, most recently Dominic D'souza. You can check the series out here.  Another blog which has recently come to this Kat's attention is Chillin' Competition, composed by Pablo Ibáñez Colomo -- it's well worth a look. Meanwhile, Mark Anderson, the doyen of IP transactional bloggers, expresses in IP Draughts his own perplexity at the increasingly execrated ruling of the US Supreme Court on post-expiry royalty payments in Kimble v  Marvel. Finally, from the European Commission's blog, keen holiday snappers can put their minds at rest after digesting the good news that "Europe is not banning tourist photos of the London Eye" (Katpat to Chris Torrero), a theme addressed by fellow Kat Eleonora earlier today. In short:

"Recent press reports may have left readers with the idea that the EU is about to legislate to “ban” or “censor” holiday snaps of famous monuments and art works and/or make it illegal to upload them to Facebook or Instagram. There is no such legal proposal on the table. Even if there were, it would require the agreement not only of MEPs but of a large majority of Member States, most of which, like the UK, currently apply “freedom of panorama”. That principle allows anyone to publish, even for commercial ends, images of public places, including the buildings and public art works permanently located in those places. Some other Member States, including France and Belgium, have laws which restrict – usually to non-commercial purposes – the use of such images without prior authorisation. But they do not seek to ban people from taking photos for their own pleasure. Neither is there any evidence that tourists are being dragged through French or Belgian courts simply for uploading holiday photos to their Facebook page, as the reports suggest would be the case if similar rules were extended EU-wide".

Around the weblogs 2. The MARQUES Class 46 and Class 99 weblogs both invite their readers to participate in the organisation's "tell us who you are and what you want" survey, which offers a bottle of Luxembourg Cremant as a random prize to one lucky adult respondent.  Class 46 also carries Laetitia Lagarde's useful posts on proof of priority in Community trade mark (CTM) opposition proceedings and on the inevitable problems faced by anyone trying to register the word essence as a CTM for cosmetics. The jiplp weblog hosts a follow-up by Jakub Mrozowski and Michal Siciarek to Tomasz Rychlicki's earlier CTM piece on how to justify decisions while rejecting the evidence.

Looking for a job? The United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office is currently advertising for a new, London-based press officer. The particulars can be accessed and read here. Being a media relations officer is not apparently for the faint-hearted, the position being "highly rewarding" [not that these words refer to the remuneration ...] and, in words that could have been specially selected by the Delphic Oracle, an "active job which you will be hard pressed to match".