OCH IP; COPYRIGHT WORLD

Och IP

"Och aye" is about the only Scottish lingo the IPKat knows, so he's very grateful to leading Scottish intellectual property practice Maclay Murray & Spens for publishing "A Guide to Scottish Court IP Jargon". This handy pocket guide has getting on for 20 pages of terms, most of which are not IP-specific and will be helpful whatever your legal interest. Some terms are "Scottish to English", others are "English to Scottish". The IPKat is desperately impressed. Merpel, however, will take some persuading before she utters in court the words "awa' an bile yer heid" (politely translated as "get lost").

If you want a copy, why not send MMS' head of IP Gill Grassie an email? If you ask her very nicely, the IPKat's sure she'll let you have one.

How to speak Scottish here
Haggis website here (adult advisory)


Copyright World

The IPKat's copy of the May issue of Copyright World, published ten times a year by Informa, leads with a feature by the Field Fisher Waterhouse pair Nick Rose and Louisa Albertini on the problems faced by copyright owners who bring infringement actions against competitors who are marketing similar works (one problem, Merpel notes, is that the fact that a competitor's work is similar doesn't mean it's a copyright infringement ...).

Right: peas in a pod may be similar, but need not be infringing ...

There's also a note on the US "thumbnail" litigation in Perfect 10 v Google by Daniel Glazer and Karina Camacho (Sullivan & Cromwell), in which a California Federal District Court ruled that Google's incorporation of miniaturised images of photographs into its Image search facility can be an infringement of copyright, althou the framing and linking to full-size images would be unlikely to be either direct or contributory infringement.

Also of note is a neat warning by Robert Watson and Stephen Carter (Mewburn Ellis) on the "first disclosure" rule for the protection of unregistered Community designs.