Cracking Ideas and a day to remember
Today IPKat team member Jeremy trekked out to the furthest reaches of Windsor, to the Land of Lego, where the new UK Minister for Intellectual Property, Baroness Wilcox (right), presented awards to a collection of sweet, well-behaved and creative children -- winners of this year's World of Cracking Ideas competition. Some 9,000 youngsters from across the nation took time off from whatever it is that youngsters do these days (sending messages in textese, file-sharing and daubing each other's Facebook walls?) to offer their ideas. 
Today's event, the culmination of a joint venture between the Intellectual Property Office and Wallace and Gromit creators Aardman Animations, took place in St Leonard's Mansion, Legoland, an edifice that was built in order to test the proposition that humans could live without oxygen and air conditioning for up to 90 minutes. It was all rather lovely. The IPKat hopes that initiatives like this will survive the impending round of public sector spending cuts, if only for the sake of the happiness they give to a roomful of proud parents ...
Left: cunningly disguised as an dog, an IPO civil servant manages to gate-crash Legoland for the day
The range of ideas on offer was broad. Most would not even come close to fulfilling the criteria of patentability, but that wasn't the point. The objective of the exercise was twofold: to encourage children to play an active role in thinking up ideas rather than being no more than passive consumers of the ideas of others, and to recognise the whole point of IP: just as a bicycle that wasn't locked or protected when left unguarded might be taken away, so too might the unique content of their own creative thought, if not secured by an IP right where appropriate and available.
Right: cunningly disguised as a man looking for his errant dog, an IPO civil servant manages to gate-crash Legoland for the day
IPO press release on the winners here
Aardman here
The Wrong Trousers here
The Wrong Wallis here
