Friday flounderings

The IPKat's 'Forthcoming Events' feature, which you will find in the left-hand side-bar of this weblog's front page, contains some fresh entries which you may not yet have seen. Don't forget to check them out.

True or false? In over 165 years since Venezuela introduced a patent system, no court has ever made a ruling that a patent is valid and enforceable. Click here to read Richard N. Brown's challenging article on Venezuela's fascinating patent system.

Pitiblawg is nothing to do with pity: it's an intellectual property/information technology law weblog masterminded by Daniel Torres Gonçalves -- an Edinburgh (Scotland) based Portuguese scholar who is a member of the Scripted editorial board. He blogs in Portuguese. You can check his blog out here.


By Hague Notification No. 87 the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) announces that the Republic of Lithuania has recently deposited its instrument of accession to the Geneva Act of the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs. The Geneva Act will enter into force in respect of Lithuania on 26 September 2008. With accession, all three Baltic States will now be part of the increasingly-popular Hague system (full list of members here).


The Ninth Edition of the Butterworths Intellectual Property Handbook, to which IPKat team blogger Jeremy is Consultant Editor, is now under preparation nd will be published in late 2009. If you are a user of this weighty tome -- the Eighth Edition runs to 2,161 pages which makes it pretty cheap at just £106 -- and you have any bright ideas as to what should be included in the Ninth Edition, please email Jeremy here and let him know. Everyone who suggests any useful additional content will be put into a hat (well, their names will ...) and the lucky winner of a completely random draw will receive a copy for a prize.

Via Reuters and the Wall Street Journal (thanks to Matthew Gilchrist) comes the news that Verizon Communications Inc, Google Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and Ericsson are believed to be teaming up to defend themselves against potential patent-infringement lawsuits by buying up key intellectual property before it falls into the hands of trolls who could use it against them. Businesses joining this little group (is it a cartel? is it a standards-setting body?) will pay around $250,000 to join plus a further $5 million in escrow with a view to marking future patent purchases. Says the IPKat, this just goes to show how fertile the patent system is, as yet another business model develops ...