Two forthcoming events

As the deep midwinter approaches, so too does the Thirteenth Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference. Organised by CLT and endorsed by the IPKat (team blogger Jeremy is by longstanding tradition in the chair), this event is held in Central London on Thursday 29 January and is packed full of excitement.

Right: here are just a few of the celebrities who will not be gracing this year's conference panel

This year's programme has 10 individual speakers, a Celebrity Panel discussion and ends with a sponsored cocktail reception. Although it would be invidious to single out any of the speakers for special mention, this programme has some novelties this time around:

* Veronica Barresi (UCL) will explain how you can make an intellectual property right disappear -- the European Court of Justice did this in its little-noted Efkon decision;

* Sarah Wright (Olswang) will look closely at the advantages and snags of trade mark coexistence agreements;

* Pat Treacy (Bristows) will be looking at two key areas where patents and competition law meet head-on: telecoms and the pharma industry.

You can read all the programme details and speakers' biographies, and find the booking form, if you click here. There's also a competition. The IPKat's last attempt at a competition for this conference was a bit of a failure: he has decided to scrap, for at least the time being, contests that involve asking readers to supply captions. Instead, now that the fight against counterfeits and IP infringements has become one of the major issues of our time and Superman, Batman etc have failed to defeat the evil perpetrators, readers are invited to invent some new Superheroes who might just do the job. Please send your entries (more than one entry per person is fine) to the IPKat here, with the subject line Superheroes -- and, please, no SuperKat... Closing date, Thursday 15 January 2009.


Somewhat sooner, and a good deal cheaper -- since admission is free -- is the next meeting organised by the IP Finance weblog. The subject is "IP term: what it means in finance terms". This is a discussion on the financial implications of the duration of intellectual property protection. Anna Feros (a senior associate at Shepherd & Wedderburn) will be speaking on patent term, while John Enser (partner, Olswang) will talk about copyright term. As is traditional at these events the speakers will not speak for too long and there will be excellent opportunities for networking.

Left: the Grim Reaper searches for a patent to terminate ...

The date: Tuesday 16 December; the time: 5pm till 6.30pm; the venue: Shepherd & Wedderburn's London office (address and directions here -- and jolly well make sure you know where you're going, since it's dark at 5pm and the building suffers from London numbering). If you're planning on coming, email Anna Feros here so that we can all be forewarned.