Friday fantasies

We'll never know what they were laughing at,
since Twitter took the joke down ...

Twitter jokes: Katpost goes viral and it's no joke! "Lifting Jokes on Twitter", recently posted to this weblog by leading copyright Kat Eleonora, has attracted the attention of the wider media.  First we learned that this article on Twitter's take-down of tweets that allegedly infringed copyright had been picked up by practitioners' publication Legal Week. Then we discovered that our good friends at Managing Intellectual Property had been giving it some air.  Says the IPKat, it's lovely to know that what we post on this weblog is put to good use by others.  Adds Merpel, yes, just like you put their content to good use too ...

Forthcoming attractions.  Apart from the IPKat's frequent Friday reminder that there are lots of great events coming up, which you can check on his Forthcoming Events page, it's also the dawn of a new month -- August -- which means that it's time for the monthly Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property summary of events coming up in that lovely month.  Talking of events, the next JIPLP-GRUR London seminar, on IP Enforcement in the wake of the IP Enforcement Directive,, is coming up on 8 September: more than 60 people have now registered, but there's still room for more. Details of this seminar, which is free and has this Kat in the chair, can be accessed here.

Patents for second medical use, coming to a Bosphorus near you.  The mysteries of the patentability of a substance that already has one known medical use, one a further medical use is found for it, have been recently addressed in numerous Katposts on the litigation in England and Wales between Warner-Lambert and Actavis, most recently here and here. This Kat thanks his friends at the Turkish IP practice of Deriş for the information that Turkish practice, following that of the European Patent Convention, indicates that patents are available there for second medical use. Thanks go to Okan Can for sending him this link to the piece he wrote together with his colleagues.

Around the weblogs. "Old Money, Old Navy, Fabric Copyright Infringement Suit, Oh Dear!" is Marie-Andrée Weiss's instructive post on the 1709 Blog about a US copyright infringement action involving fabric designs (clothing designs per se are unprotected by copyright law on the basis that they are "useful articles").  There's also a CopyKat post from Ben Challis with a round-up that includes the latest on the sad saga of copyright in that eternal dirge "Happy Birthday to You".  The jiplp weblog features a note by Indranath Gupta and Vishwas H. Devaiah on the Court of Justice of the European Union ruling in Ryanair v PR Aviation, on whether the"you can't contract out" provisions of the Database Directive apply to data that isn't protected as well as to data which is. PatLit carries a helpful account by Marqués Jarque and Silvia Saenz de Ormijana on the new Spanish Patent Act and what it foretells for a jurisdiction that is determined not to be marginal in innovation terms, whatever it feels about the new European patent package.

  
In brief, and now at length.  The AmeriKat neatly potted this month's resolution of the major US patent dispute between Netflix and Rovi, relating to five Rovi patents covering interactive programme guides and multiple-device playback, in a single succinct paragraph here. Katfriend Kevin Winters, not to be outdone, has prepared his own summary of this decision which stretches to a little over 4,000 words: you can check it out here.