Friday fantasies

Engineers, this is for you. A reader has asked this Kat if he can recommend any examples of well-drafted engineering patents. No Kat would be so rash as to make his or her own personal choice, but it is known and accepted that readers of this weblog, particularly those who post comments under cover of anonymity, are generally very happy to share their opinion with others. So, dear readers, links to well-drafted engineering patents are invited, so long as they are accompanied by at least a few words of explanation as to why the recommended patents are well-drafted.

Not feeling the draft.  The 18th Draft of the Procedural Rules for the Unified Patent Court is on its way, as PatLit reported this morning here.  The Drafting Committee looks set to conclude the serial drafting of a workable set of rules this coming October. While not everyone is looking forward to the new court, quite a few people will be shedding a silent tear or two for the 17th Draft before it heads for oblivion; it has after all been the subject of a considerable number of Mock Trials and real-time patent litigation experiments and has spawned quite a publishing industry of its own. "Bye-bye 17th Draft", says Merpel, waving a paw, "we shall miss you".

Those OJs. As readers with good memories will recall, this Kat observed last week that anyone who works with intellectual property documents in the European Union will be familiar with the "OJ" references that appear in their citation. For example, "Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, OJ 2001, L 167, 10-19", where the "OJ" reference relates to the issue of the Official Journal of the European Union that contains the document, together with its printed page numbers. Together with Merpel, this Kat was pondering as to whether anyone actually uses these OJ references any more, so they ran a little sidebar poll, asking: "Those 'OJ' references: when did you last actually use one?" 119 good souls were kind enough to respond and their answers were as follows

• Within the past week 14 (11%) 
• Within the past month 8 (6%) 
• Within the past year 17 (14%) 
• So long ago, you can't remember 80 (67%) 

The Kats were a little surprised that the OJs were quite as heavily used as they were, though the preponderant majority of people either don't use them at all or are possessed of less than perfect memories.

Around the weblogs 1. Chillin' Competition has offered a rather more competition-flavoured account of the Court of Justice of the European Union ruling yesterday in Case C-170/13 Huawei v ZTE, a ruling which to this Kat gave a somewhat shortish shrift yesterday.  The IP Finance weblog also carries a Spanish insight into the same decision, from Elzaburu's Colm Ahern. Elsewhere, Innovation Frontline has a neat post on patent strategy in conditions of legal uncertainty, here: while it clearly has conditions in the US in mind, much of what is written is at least potentially relevant to the European Union too.

Around the weblogs 2.  The term 'engineering compromise' is not one that this Kat had previously encountered, till he met it on the Class 99 design law weblog via a guest post from Pratyush Nath Upreti.  The same blog carries recent news from the UK on the topic of the need to stick an aesthetically disfiguring registered design number on a manufactured product, something which should soon be a thing of the past. On the 1709 Blog, Marie-Andrée Weiss wins the Alliteration of the Week Award for "Sun, Sunburn, Sex and Selfies", a legal appreciation of #SunBurnArt.and nudity, and there's also a handsome guest post from Mathilde Pavis on the French perspective on originality under the law of copyright.