Wednesday whimsies

This case is all about
seats for airplanes

If you are a patent-y person, you may have been following the fiercely contested litigation in Virgin Atlantic Airways Limited v v Premium Aircraft Interiors (UK) Limited (noted here by Matt the Kat).  One of the more important aspects of this case is that it has again raised the question whether a successful claimant in patent infringement proceedings can secure damages when the patent is subsequently held to be invalid (see earlier PatLit posts here and here). It has been happily drawn to this Kat's attention by one of his truly observant friends that the Supreme Court has granted leave to appeal. If you are wondering what happened, there has been what we experts call a "changed circumstance" -- the decision of the EPO Technical Board of Appeal to amend Virgin's infringed patent almost beyond recognition. This was not foreseen by the Supreme Court when it considered the position in the first half of last year.

Golden Eggs for the
Golden Gate ...

Breakfast with Alfred and at least 134 other trade mark enthusiasts is the delightful prospect facing anyone attending the Madrid Protocol Breakfast Meeting at San Francisco's Golden Gate University on Tuesday 17 May, during this year's International Trademark Association Meeting.  The Alfred in question is Strahlberg and he has toiled tirelessly to set up an effective ginger group to help WIPO identify and deal with glitches in the soon-to-be-perfect Madrid System for international trade mark filing.  The meeting has its own LinkedIn group here and it's not too late to register your intent to attend. It's a great way to socialise over an unusually early breakfast after the previous night's networking.


New logo.  The 1709 Blog, which likes to bring you news and views concerning copyright in all its glory, has just had a new face-lift just a new template, really) in order to inaugurate its new logo.  It's not supposed to represent a copyright-shaped cake with a chunk cut out of it, but rather an old-fashioned clock face, without numbers, but with the hour and minute hands pointing respectively to the '5' (in the 24 hour clock system "17") and just ahead of the '2' (representing one sixth of the twelve five-minute intervals into which minutes are divided, or "09", which is just before "10"), giving you ... 1709.

Around the blogs.  In what looks as though it might just be the last shot before the Easter break, PatLit's PCC Page series on the workings of the Patents County Court (PCC) for England and Wales ponders the prospect of a PCC litigant striking out a somewhat mischievous counter action brought against him in the more expensive Patents Court by his PCC defendant.  IP Finance carries a bit of news which most people have missed -- the establishment in Taiwan of a bank to support Taiwanese businesses which find themselves at the receiving end of a writ for patent infringement (here).  The Class 99 weblog has spotted an appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union in one of the most curious spats between a design and a trade mark we've seen to date (here, over the artwork displayed on the left).  And if you never knew what a MetroCartist was, Art & Artifice will surely tell you here.

Not the courts -- Manchester's
railway station

Talking of the PCC, the IPKat has learned that the popular, dashing judge, Colin Birss QC, has intimated to an audience at a recent Appleyard Lees seminar in Manchester, that he was happy to bring the PCC to Manchester [could it be the comfortable seats on the Virgin trains, mewses Merpel?] and could "see good reasons for doing so" [ie lots of infringements to deal with?].  The IPKat thinks it makes a terrific amount of sense for smaller, lower-value intellectual property actions to be heard in Manchester rather than drag the parties and their professional advisers down to London, especially since it's generally cheaper to fly to the Continent from anywhere in England than to take the train to London.