Friday fancies

On his recent flying visit to the Dutch AIPPI meeting in Zeist, IPKat team blogger Jeremy was given a copy of Dirk Visser's little book, Trade Mark Case Law ECJ, a series of "one-page summaries" published in English by DeLex last year (it's also available in Dutch, for those English readers who prefer a real challenge). The book was so slender, at 78 pages, that it got stuck in the pile of papers Jeremy carries around with him and he has only just found it again. It's a neat little book, concentrating on what the ECJ actually says rather than (i) what everyone thinks it says, (ii) what everyone thinks it means, or (iii) what everyone thinks it ought to have said. There are also some helpful illustrations, in colour where appropriate. Dirk is a scholar with a sharp eye for the relevant. Nice one, Dirk!


Good news for authors is that, according to the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) in the UK, photocopying royalties are being paid over to authors. Bad news, according to the research conducted for the ALCS by the Centre for Intellectual Property and Policy and Management at Bournemouth University, is that authors earn 33% less than the national average wage. 43,388 authors receive payments from the ALCS each year, the average payment being £302.02 per person (that's around 443 euro, or US$593). The biggest single pay-out was £51,000.


When is product placement not product placement? The answer is: when the owner of the 'placed' brand is desperate to get it unplaced again. Thanks, Simon Haslam, for sending the IPKat this link to a BBC feature on a new Italian film, Seven Kilometres from Jerusalem, in which an advertising executive suffering a mid-life crisis meets a man who appears to be Jesus. In the course of the film Jesus drinks a can of Coke and the ad man exclaims: "God, what a great endorsement!" Coca-Cola objected that permission to use its trade mark had not been granted. The BBC item doesn't say whether the scene has been cut. Merpel wonders whether the placement/endorsement is actually so valuable: after all, Jesus jeans never made it past Levis. Jesus jeans here. anti-Jesus jeans here. What's really seven km from Jerusalem here.


The IPKat's copy of the Spring 2007 issue of Oxford University Press's International Journal of Law and Information Technology contains two fairly major intellectual property features:

* "Copyright Infringement in a Borderless World - Does Territoriality Matter?", an analytical dissection of a piece of recent judicial history, SOCAN v Canadian Association of Internet Providers, by Susanna H. S. Leong (National University of Singapore Business School) and Cheng Lim Saw (Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University) and

* "Orphan Works, Abandonware and the Missing Market for Copyrighted Goods" by Dennis W. K. Khong (University of Manchester) - which bounces along quite nicely till you hit the algebra near the end.

Full contents of this issue here.


Finally, says the IPKat, a Good Friday and a Happy Easter to our Christian readers - and of course a lovely weekend to all visitors to this weblog, regardless of their religion, colour, creed or position on the patenting of computer software ...