Wednesday whimsies

Never too late!  On the Monday of every week this weblog publishes a "Never Too Late ..." feature in which it summarises, complete with links, the topics covered in the previous week's Katposts.  This week was no exception. However, since Monday of this week was a public holiday in the United Kingdom, many readers from that happy land may well have missed this week's round-up. If you were one of them, it's here.

Enforcement seminar: a final reminder.  Attendance figures are up into the 90s now for the JIPLP-GRUR seminar next Tuesday, 8 September, on the Impact of the IP Enforcement Directive on National Law. It's still possible to get a few more people into the venue, kindly provided by Taylor Wessing LLP which has given us use of its London facilities. With speakers Wiebke Baars (from Taylor Wessing's Hamburg office) and Michael Edenborough QC (Serle Court), panellists Paul Stevens (Olswang LLP), Anna Carboni (Redd; till recently an Appointed Person) and Mark Owen (Taylor Wessing), it's bound to be both educational and entertaining. The seminar is free to attend. If you've not yet signed up but plan to do so, click here for details.  Likewise, if you have already signed up but then discover that you can't attend, please let the organisers know so that someone else can fill your space.

Just for starters ...

Not out to lunch ... but looking forward to dinner. As previously intimated on this weblog, on Thursday 10 September IPKat blogmeister Jeremy is speaking at the next dinner meeting of UNION (the Union of European Practitioners in Intellectual Property, that is).  The title -- "IP in 2015 - Where we are v Where I thought we'd be"  -- is broad enough to suit all tastes and a multiplicity of interpretations. Details of the event can be found in full in this flyer.  The venue is the Royal Over-Seas League, which is somewhere around here.  Cutlery will be provided.

A chance to have your say 1.  Back on 4 August, Merpel posted this item on the Association of Members of the Boards of Appeal (AMBA) consultation on the reform of the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office.  She is naturally delighted that some folk have offered their comments, even though this is a non-chargeable activity, but she is concerned that not enough good souls have lent their own wisdom to this once-in-a-lifetime exercise.  Please, therefore, take a look at the proposals and do the honourable thing ...



A chance to have your say 2. In order to enhance the efficiency of the global patent system the IP5 Offices -- that's the patent offices of the United States, China, Korea, Japan and Europe --  endeavour to explore the harmonisation of their practices and procedures. This being so, the Patent Harmonisation Experts Panel (PHEP, a technical body of the IP5) has initiated work on the following items under the lead of the Offices in brackets:

• unity of invention (EPO, SIPO)
• citation of prior art (KIPO, USPTO)
• written description/sufficiency of disclosure (JPO).

Maintaining that significant progress has been made in all three topics. The IP5 Offices have produced comprehensive reports outlining their own relevant practices regarding unity of invention and citation of prior art, and have also compiled a list of terminology on written description/sufficiency of disclosure. Your feedback is welcomed, though it's anybody's guess what they might do with it. The documents for you to peruse and comment upon are unity of invention, citation of prior art and the list of terminology on written description. Please send your comments to IP5 here. If anyone has something really exciting to say, can they copy Merpel in, please? There's more information available here (Katpat to Chris Torrero).


Words, words, words ... The ever-cultured Mark Anderson, of IP Draughts fame, has been attending the Edinburgh Festival of late.  What was in his mind? According to his post on this great annual attraction:

This blog is meant to be about intellectual property, and there was little in the above performances that raised IP issues, though IP Draughts idly speculated on whether the repetition of a single word several hundred or thousand times could amount to a copyright work.

We all know the answer to that, but we're not saying.