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Home / Jeremy Phillips / Monday miscellany / Monday miscellany

Monday miscellany

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... must at least be identifiable
Reminder for all readers: from today, Monday 7 September, readers' comments will no longer be accepted if they are not submitted (i) in the name of their author or (ii) under a pseudonym. Sorry if this causes annoyance (which we hope it won't) or confusion (which we expect it will). However, the difficulties faced in trying to work out who has said what have prompted the Kats to spring into action and make this rule.  The Blogger 'string' solution suggested by some readers doesn't really seem to address the issue since readers who post comments often do so in relation to several different earlier posts or discussions at the same time, on topics that are interrelated.  Anyway, thanks for your cooperation!

Copyright course at UCL claims to be sensible -- but you can get certified for taking it. "In the light of the copyright activities at the Commission", writes Katfriend Amanda Harcourt, "we are running a flexible course for the copyright industries at UCL in January [Monday 18 to Friday 22, to be precise] to explore the information from Brussels and that we hope will be sensible. You will see that it is framed so that attendees can come to part of the course so that they can augment their knowledge.  Thursday and Friday is compulsory-- and there is the option of 3 days, 4 days or the whole week (with accompanying price adjustments)". The star attraction of the course, which leads to a Certificate in Legal Rights and Trade Practices in the Creative Industries (CILRATPICI?), is the participation of fellow Kat Eleonora and recent guest Kat Tom Ohta among the 37 faculty members. Further details are available here. 

Here's a sample graphic, taken from last week's
IAM Business Report on Billion-dollar Start-ups
Looking for graphics to support your blogpost?  People who write blogposts on IP analytics and statistics-related topics are often short of a decent chart or diagram to illustrate or ideally prove the points they are trying to make, and most bloggers lack the time, the ability or the inclination (or all three) to work out how to compose one.  If you are one of such people, here's some good news: IP analytics company Aistemos has kindly offered to provide charts and analytics in support of submissions to this weblog, to IP Finance and indeed to any other weblog that offers a serious treatment of IP analytics, statistics, big data and the like.  If you want to take up this offer, your first port of call is Marcus Malek (whom you can email at marcus.malek@aistemos.com).
Around the weblogs.  On the 1709 Blog former guest Kat Marie-Andrée writes up the welcome decision that a Californian city council was not allowed to assert copyright infringement against a citizen who used the video recordings of its council meetings in order to criticise its decisions and the positions taken by some of its members. The same blog carries more welcome news, from Ben Challis this time, that the saga of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier and A Slight Trick of the Mind has finally settled -- though the terms of settlement have not been disclosed and this blogger suspects that they may have been driven by convenience and expediency rather than honour.  The jiplp weblog lists four more books for review, for those who are speedy enough to respond to the invitation. 

Recent publications of note. "New banknotes not on the money - iwi", by Laura Bootham on Radio New Zealand News, reports on what, to this Kat at any rate, looks like the first recorded instance of the attribution of items of traditional culture to the wrong Māori tribe. The IP lawyers have been called in (Katpat to Jonathan Barrett for the link).  Protection of traditional knowledge other than through intellectual property is the theme of long-time campaigner and former Indian patent examiner R. S. Praveen Raj, in "No Need Of IPRs For Protecting Traditional Knowledge", hosted by Intellectual Property Watch, here.
Monday miscellany Monday miscellany Reviewed by Jeremy on Monday, September 07, 2015 Rating: 5

1 comment:

  1. Tim JacksonMonday, 7 September 2015 at 18:03:00 GMT+1

    Jeremy, I hope you might reconsider the decision not to use a string / threaded style of comment posting, at least for an experimental period. I can't speak for how good the Blogger solution might be, but generally I think the issues are:

    1. In longer threads, there's a real difficulty to make clear what you are replying to. Often this means copying and pasting text from a post some distance away, and then grappling with HTML tags (e.g. italics) to try to make clear that it is quoted text. Some posters might not have the technical knowledge to do this, but even for those of us that do, it's a pain. A good threaded solution can reduce the need for this, and make arguments much easier for a reader to follow.

    2. While you're right that sometimes people reply to several different posts at the same time, a threaded presentation style might persuade them to reply to each post individually, so that the replies then appear more logically as direct responses. Where that's not feasible, the poster can simply put his multiple response beneath all other comments, as at present. So this isn't really a downside.

    3. In many cases IPKat threads are quite short. For these, a threaded solution won't make much difference, but wouldn't do any harm either.


    In summary, I think a threaded solution has strong advantages, and where those don't apply nothing is lost.

    By the way, I suspect that grappling with HTML tags might be the reason some posters' comments disappear into the ether and are never seen again. If you get the HTML syntax wrong, Blogger is rather unhelpful. After you click "Publish", it puts you at the top of the list of comments. But the syntax error message telling you that your comment has not been accepted is down at the bottom. In a long thread, you only notice it if you scroll down a long way. It's quite easy to miss it and assume that your message is in the moderation queue. Then later on you wonder why it hasn't appeared.

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

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