Thursday thingies

Amazing response: it's only a day since registration opened for the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) 10th Anniversary Conference (details here), and this Kat, who will be making his final appearance on an IP stage, is thrilled to tell you that the amazing number of 129 kind folk have already registered. If you plan to attend, don't delay -- and if you find that you can't attend after all, do let it be known so that your food drink place can be allocated to someone more deserving available.

Is the Kiwi logo
out of copyright?

Will you be on the wrong side of the world on 26 November, and therefore unable to attend the JIPLP 10th Anniversary Conference in London?  If so, do bear in mind that, on 27 and 28 November, the Asian Pacific Copyright Association is holding its Inaugural Conference on ‘Copyright Law and Policy in the Asian Pacific’. The venue is  Auckland, New Zealand (home of the kiwi, the only bird in the world with nostrils at the end of its beak). The conference website and call for papers are here. This means that, if you are from Europe, Africa or the USA you have a chance to air your views before a fresh audience of copyright enthusiasts who might not yet have heard them ...

... or indeed any name

Reminder: if you can't use your name, use a pseudonym.  The IPKat and Merpel have occasionally been a little more merciful than perhaps they might be, allowing some interesting comments by readers to percolate on to their blog even though their authors have not given a real or false name but have simply left themselves as "Anonymous". For the sake of other readers and potential commentators, please give a clue as to which person or Anonymous you are!

Language matters.  This Kat, and probably all the other Kats that there have ever been, receives lots of information -- often in the form of promotional newsletters and circulars -- from law firms across the world concerning developments in their jurisdictions. Some are of little interest to most readers of this weblog, such as changes in official filing fees, while others are of considerable significance, such as major legal decisions or, as sometimes happens, proposed legislation that either improves on or is in breach of the norms of our favourite intellectual property treaties and conventions.  We can't use all of this material and, to be quite honest, we can't always understand it since it may have been translated into English by machine or composed by someone whose command of English is not quite up to the task.  While full of admiration for anyone who can work in a foreign language, this Kat suggests in a friendly manner which, he hopes, will not be taken amiss, that it really is a good idea to get someone who is a native English speaker to take a quick look over the text before it goes out, in order to identify and eradicate anything that can't be properly understood.  Merpel adds: this applies to any foreign language, and not just English.

Merpel has let it be known that she is somewhat displeased with the news that has been trickling in her direction from the European Patent Office (EPO), and the veritable cascade of correspondence that has been reaching her from various anxious and troubled souls who work there.  She will therefore shortly be returning to the subject of the EPO and its governance.

Around the weblogs.  A vigorous tussle between the applicant to register LEXDELL as a Community trade mark for all sorts of goods and services and the owner of the well known DELL trade mark is recorded in Katfriend Laetitia Lagarde's Class 46 post here (incidentally, both parties purport to have an interest in clothing and headgear in Class 25).  IP Tango's redoubtable Patricia Covarrubia explains the controversy over the Guti mark in Peru and the whys and wherefores of trade marks for condoms [a definite case of quis custoidiet ipsos custodes, quips Merpel].  IP Draughts' Mark Anderson offers a view of contract negotiating techniques as they appear in the works of William Shakespeare, while Aistemos takes a look at automotive patents and the continued shift of power from the car makers to their suppliers [somewhat following the IPKat's good example, Aistemos offers a handy round-up of the previous month's blogposts. This Kat hopes other active blogs will do the same as a matter of course].