Wednesday whimsies

The IPKat's friend and trade mark enthusiast Keith Farwell (Phillips & Leigh) sadly died towards the end of last year at the very young age of 45.  His widow Rebecca is creating a very positive monument to his life by raising money for Kidney Research UK in his memory. Donations can be made via JustGiving here.

There's lots going on at PatLit these days.  The 14th in the series of PCC Pages on the Patents County Court for England Wales deals with the risk of a threats action here; the debate over damages for infringing a patent which is subsequently held to be invalid continues here and here, together with readers' comments.  And there's also a report on Axel Horns' criticism of the European Patent Office's attempts at data capture when making the second edition of Patent Litigation in Europe -- and on what can be done to avoid it.

Google Transliteration isn't a service that this Kat knew about, till reader Chris Torrero pointed it out to him.  According to the available information, 

"Google Transliteration allows you to type phonetically using Roman characters. Simply type a word the way it sounds in English and Google Transliteration will convert it to its local script. We currently support 24 languages: Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya and Urdu."

You can check it out for yourself here.  It ought to be some use to anyone who wants to know what his trade marks look like in other scripts. Do let the Kats know what you think of it, but please -- no jokes about "litter" ...

From Luxembourg today comes news of one ruling from the General Court that caught the Kat's eye.  It's Case T-437/09 Oyster Cosmetics SpA v Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market, Kadabell GmbH & Co. KG. It was not the world's most exciting and controversial of Community trade mark oppositions. Oyster sought to register the Oyster mark represented here for : ‘Bleaching preparations and other substances, all for laundry use; cleaning, polishing, degreasing and abrasive preparations; soaps; perfumery, essential oils, cosmetics, hair lotions; hair colorants; dentifrices’ (all in Class 3) and Kadabell opposed, citing its earlier Oystra mark (also represented here) for ‘Soaps, perfumeries, essential oils, preparations for body and beauty care, hair lotions, dentifrices’ (Class 3). The marks were found to be similar, as were the goods, and it was no surprise that the Opposition Division, the Board of Appeal and now the General Court thought so too. But what surprised the Kat was this line taken from the account of the proceedings before the Opposition Division:

"...  the Opposition Division upheld the opposition in part. The opposition was rejected only in respect of the goods ‘preparations for cleaning waste pipes’. Those goods were not in the list of goods provided with the registration application. They were, however, in the English translation of that list, on which the Opposition Division based its decision".

This can't really be true, can it? Is Oyster really going be landed with a Community trade mark for a description of goods which it didn't apply for and which, Merpel mewses, isn't anything that Oyster Cosmetics makes or is likely to do so, simply because of a random bureaucratic decision that has nothing to do with reality?

Sticking the knife into
a cheese that's a legend?

Around the other blogs.  "Initial interest confusion recognised by the English Courts", a JIPLP Current Intelligence note by Baker & McKenzie duo Peter O'Byrne and Ben Allgrove, is available in full here on the jiplp weblog.  Art & Artifice picked up first the good news that there'd been no looting at the Egyptian Musuem, followed by the sad news that there had.  There's a difference of opinion between two of the IPKat's favourite bloggers, Edith Van den Eede of Class 46 (here) and Patricia Covarrubia of IP Tango (here) on the merits of Colombia protecting Italy's Parmigiano Reggiano cheese as a geographical indication. The 1709 Blog provides a very thoughtful little piece, "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction", from the very thoughtful Hugo Cox, here.  A total of 259 people have now signed the Afro-IP petition calling for an investigation into the murder of fake-fighter John Nortje here.