Friday Fantasies

Welcome to this week's cornucopia of IP delights, particularly for the webinar-inclined reader.

Conferences & Events

Starting on 22 October 2020, the Digital Law Center of the University of Geneva, and Kat friends Irene Calboli and Jacques de Werra, will host the Luxury Digital Law Series (poster on the right hand side), a five-webinar initiative focusing on current issues related to the luxury industry and its digital expansion. The Series aims at creating a forum to discuss luxury product-related legal issues in Geneva and internationally, with a variety of high-profile speakers including the IPKat's own Eleonora Rosati. Anyone interested in issues related to the production, distribution, marketing, and protection of luxury products can find further information and registration here.

The University of Alicante is hosting an online conference on Intellectual Property, Access to Content and the Digital Single Market on 15-16 October, with sessions taking place in either Spanish or English. Further information and (free) registration can be found here.

Law firm Lewis Silkin is running its IP360 series of Autumn webinars, as follows:

• 14 October: IP without borders; how to protect your brand online during the e-commerce boom
• 21 October: IP Valuation: A Primer
• 29 October: Offence and defence: patent litigation fundamentals
• 04 November: The IP jigsaw – how do the pieces fit together to protect your rights?
• 11 November: IP audits: A strategy for risk reduction, cost savings and finding your forgotten assets
• 18 November: Solving online infringements – a cross-industry perspective
• 25 November: The Anatomy of a Successful Franchise
• 02 December: The value of understanding an IP portfolio – the M&A context
• 09 December: Innovation and patent strategy, joined by David Goodfellow from Aptiv

For more information, see the registration page or their full list of upcoming events.

This Kat is thinking wistfully of Spring

Call for Evidence

The UK IPO has launched an informal Call for Evidence, open until 2 November 2020, on two key areas of the legal framework for IP enforcement: 

• the cost of legal challenges
• how accessible and effective the judicial process is when protecting IP rights in the UK

Submit your evidence here.

Other

The IPKat would like to congratulate Mike Houghton (Chiron) on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine earlier this week for the discovery and characterisation of the HCV virus. In an interesting IP twist, we are reliably informed that this was the subject of Sir Robin Jacob's last case as counsel, Chiron, in 1993, with the patent upheld by Aldous J. and on appeal. This follows Professor Honjo's Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2018 for the first cancer immunotherapy, the patent for which was upheld by Birss J. 

This raises the question from Kat friend Sir Robin: have any other Nobel prize winning inventions been the subject of patent actions, in England & Wales or elsewhere?

Photo by Alex .B from Pexels