Hogarth seminar; Point to ponder

This Friday afternoon, from 2pm to 6pm, intellectual property specialists Hogarth Chambers are hosting their popular annual summer seminar.

Right: last year's Hogarth seminar (an artist's impression)

This year's theme is "The Cutting Edge", which must be something to do with the choice of venue (the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2). The speakers are as follows:

* Guy Tritton: Trade marks
* Andrew Norris and Michael Hicks: Copyright in the Court of Appeal
* Nicholas Saunders: Patentability of software
* Alastair Wilson QC: Privacy and Confidence
* Guest speaker Kim Connolly-Stone, of the Gowers Implementation Team.

For the deserving and the discerning, the event is CPD accredited for 3.5 hrs. The event is lavishly sponsored by the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (here) and Christopher Morcom QC is in the chair. It's only £95 plus VAT. If you'd like to attend, or just want more details of the cases that the speakers are talking about, contact Kathryn Williams by email here or telephone her on 020 7404 0404.


If you ask many IP lawyers, particularly the young and enthusiastic ones, how long the duration of a patent is, the answer often comes back as "twenty years". That's not strictly true, says IPKat co-blogger Jeremy, since for most inventions - where supplementary protection certificates are not available - the very maximum is twenty years from the patent's priority date, which is usually a few years short of twenty years from grant. Worse still, so many patents expire before their allotted span for a variety of perfectly justifiable reasons (the invention doesn't work; it does work but nobody wants it; it's too expensive to maintain; it's just one of a number of patents for the same invention, but it's not the best; it's superseded by a later technology etc) or are revoked. A bit of gentle sampling has led Jeremy to suspect that most patents don't live much beyond their twelfth year. That means, he says, that the average duration of a patent is about the same as the average life span as a domestic standard poodle.