Monday miscellany
If you are sending the IPKat any documents that you are hoping he will use, can you please help him by making them as easily accessible as possible by not including them in copy-protected files from which it takes time and effort to re-type. Also, can you please check whether any links work before you send them in? Each time a link doesn't work, the Kat finds himself receiving all sorts of emails from readers who are either helpful or disgruntled and who, in each case, are entitled to receive an appropriate reply. Many thanks!
Looking for training points? Practitioners from England and Wales who need CPD can satisfy these needs in Oxford, where barrister Jane Lambert (NIPC) and solicitor Peter Groves (CJ Jones Solicitors LLP and IPso Jure) are presenting a series of four half-day seminars on the Wednesday afternoons in October designed particularly for non-specialist litigators and commercial lawyers but with enough detail to be useful to the IP fraternity, especially those looking for an introduction to a new field of IP law. The sessions, predictably, cover patents, copyright, trade marks and designs respectively, and cost £400 for the series or £120 individually (plus VAT in each case). They are accredited by the SRA for 3 hours CPD each, and IPReg rules provide that SRA accreditation is good enough for them, too. The seminars will take place at the Oxford office of Morgan Cole, avoiding the need to find your way into the city centre. Further details here.
Aroumd the blogs. The IPKat's recent plea for recommendations concerning good blogs covering film and media copyright has not turned up many suggestions -- but there have been a couple of good words put in for Entertainment Law Brazil, which is masterminded by Attilio Gorini and Rodrigo Borges Carneiro (Dannemann Siemsen). You can view it here. Another blog with which this Kat has recently become acquainted is Copyhype, by US blogger Terry Hunt. This blog caters for rather longer, more analytical posts. Meanwhile, congratulations are due to the IP Finance weblog, which has now notched up its 800th email subscriber. Well done! Contributors to the IP Finance weblog include two members of the IPKat team: Jeremy in quite a minor way and, more significantly, Neil.
One of the more unusual IP press releases of this year must surely be "PING Golf Announces Trademark Agreement With Apple" (here), describing how Ping and its parent company Karsten Manufacturing Corporation have struck a deal to let Apple use its PING trade mark in connection with the latter's iTunes Ping social music discovery feature. It sounded to the Kat as though there's not a vast degree of synergy between the two companies but that Apple was happy to pay to use a coveted name -- but then recalled that the Ping name was not unknown within the recorded music industry. Thanks, Nick Fenner (Shoosmiths), for the newsy link.
Peer-reviewed R&D document portal and meeting-point Boliven plans to launch a commercial subscription service from the middle of this month. Registration however remains free for now -- and free registered users will have around two weeks to try the service and opt in to an earlybird discount against their eventual subscription. So there is a window of a week or two now to try Boliven.com out for free and save cash off any eventual subscription..
