Around the IP Blogs!

It is time for the IPKat's tour of IP around the web! [Week 5-11 February]

Let's first focus on copyright. Can You Copyright a Pose? In the past, this question has already been dealt with in case-law but Michael Risch (Written Description Blog) analyses a case where the question is not only on the pose itself but the possibility of it occurring in nature. As Madonna would say, “Strike a pose”. 

The French Constitutional Court Rejects Challenge to Image Right in National Monuments, reports the FrenchKat for The 1709 Blog. The provisions of the French Heritage Code were challenged by Wikimedia France and La Quadrature du Net, arguing that those rights should be time-limited. The Constitutional Court did not quite agree.

Make-up: a copyright affair – Argentina says YES! Body: a canvas or not a canvas? An Argentinian Appellate court decided that makeup art should be protected as much as any painting. Reporting on the case is Patricia Covarrubia, IP Tango.

Kat make-up

Sabesh Asokan recently published a JIPLP article on the subject of Demystifying the ‘Honest’ Infringer: Reorienting Our Approach to Online Copyright Infringement using Behavioural Economics, proposing a new approach to Online Infringement.

Now onto patents, The Blog of European Patent Law reports on the RPCR Reform Project, highlighting the main points of the reform.

In a post in IP Finance, Mike Mireles discusses the interesting idea several economists put forward in the paper Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation in Exposing Children to Innovation More Likely to Lead to Innovation than Financial Incentives? 

Philipp Rastemborski and Tobias Wuttke of EPLAW Patent Blog discuss the Judgment of the Federal Supreme Court, Germany, 24 October 2017, docket no. X ZR 55/16, ‘Drum Unit’, concerning exhaustion of patent rights and the limits of permissible use for drums of used toner cartridges. 

Not the oldest registered trade mark ever but certainly intriguing

And finally, a look on trade marks. Peter Schramm, Kluwer Trademark Blog, reports on the unsurprising outcome of a shape mark dispute in: Switzerland: A drinking bottle is a banal perfume bottle – Really?

Do you know which was the oldest trade mark registered in the world? And how trade mark protection evolved from antiquity to the present times? In an informative piece, Mikołaj Lech of the otherwise Polish language Prawna ochrona znaków towarowych, takes us on a time trip in The oldest registered trademarks in the world.