Friday fantasies

Friday has come around once again, and with it comes the Kats' weekly plea to readers to check the Forthcoming events side bar. The IPKat's favourite event next week is this year's informal Meet the Bloggers session, which coincides with the Annual Meeting of the International Trademark Association in Boston, Mass. IP bloggers, readers, friends and familiars will be congregating at Lucky's Lounge from 8pm until the scintillating wit runs out ...

Can anyone help? A reader has asked the IPKat for help in tracing the source of this lovely little image? If anyone has details of the artist, publisher, copyright owner etc, can he or she please email the IPKat here?

The Class 99 design weblog was quick off the mark with news of Crocs' unsuccessful appeal against the Office for Harmonisation in the European Market's Cancellation Division division decision that Crocs' registered Community design was invalid, having been anticipated by an earlier US disclosure. The text of that decision is now available in full here, all 29 pages of it.

Today's ruling of the Court of Appeal in L'Oréal v Bellure (noted earlier today by the IPKat) is the first time that an article from the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice has been cited with approval in that Court. Well done, Darren Meale and Joel Smith (Herbert Smith), the authors of "Enforcing a trade mark when nobody's confused: where the law stands after L'Oréal and Intel" (click here for abstract).

From the IPKat's Bulgarian friend Ventsi Stoilov comes this link to Intellectual Property Planet which discusses the sad news for Bulgarians that ICANN is refusing registration of domain names ending in the cyrillic letters .бг since it looks too similar to the letters .br in the Latin alphabet which are operative for Brazil. Apparently the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology in Bulgaria "will make a new poll to be offered another suitable area for Bulgaria".