Friday fantasies

Don't forget to check the IPKat's Forthcoming Events page: the Kat has uploaded quite a few new conferences and seminars of late, and he's sure you don't want to miss anything.


Katnote: blog team member Jeremy has recently been receiving in excess of 300 emails a day. Fortunately most of them do not require a great degree of attention in answering, but he still has to get through them all in order to see which ones need to be dealt with or not.  If you are awaiting a response from him, please be patient -- and please don't keep sending follow-ups to ask him if he got your earlier email.

"Should Live Tweeting Be Protected Like Broadcast Rights?" That's the question posed by Sam Laird on Mashable here.  Although the piece turned out to address the right to tweet as an exercise of the right to communicate rather than (as this Kat optimistically hoped when he saw the word 'protected' in the title) as an IP topic, it reflects the continuing growth of serious discussion of social-media related legal and commercial issues.

This Kat's charming, erudite and seemingly indefatiguable Enrico Bonadio has recently published an article in the European Intellectual Property Review (EIPR), "Plain Packaging of Tobacco Products under EU Intellectual Property Law", which he has also posted on SSRN so that all may read and enjoy it here. Since Enrico's article is all about plain packaging, and since he owes the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) at least one article, if not two, the IPKat has decided to treat readers to a plain package Abstract of Enrico's article, which you can peruse at your peril here.

A sock with no peer

From Guardian-hosted Architecture and Design Blogger Oliver Wainright comes this short and sweet report on this Wednesday's House of Lords debate when the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill (on which, see here) had its Second Reading.  This Kat has been hearing grim rumours that the UK's latest Minister for Intellectual Property, Lord Marland of Oddsock, refused any IP briefing before the debate. This Kat wonders whether his Lordship is going to disappoint the intellectual property community right from the very start, or whether this item comes further down in his list of priorities.  Merpel adds, like any government which holds itself out as being IP-friendly, the UK can benefit from the appointment of Ministers of peerless quality.  Alas, the UK's choices seem to be remarkably peerful.  Of the five Ministers who have taken responsibility (or should that be "responsibility") for intellectual property since the idea of having a Minister was put into practice in 2007, two were Lords and two were Baronesses ...