Friday fantasies

Around the weblogs.  Congratulations to the copyright-flavoured 1709 Blog, which is now 1,800 -- or at least that's the number of email subscribers it now has. Another IP blog to reach a milestone is IP Finance, whose email readership has just touched the 1,300 mark.  There's a highly constructive if perhaps controversial post on the Class 99 design law blog by fellow Kat Darren, who has taken up the challenge of Sir Robin Jacob to make suggestions for the improvement of the EU's 10-year-old design protection system. Finally, there's a fascinating post on the 1709 Blog by Ben Challis on copyright in magic, here.

The IPKat's friend Lucy, of the UK version of Blog Legal [there seem to be quite a few blogs of that name], is currently scouring the world for new content for her law blog, which you can see here. As she explains: "Blog Legal has only recently been setup and our aim is for it to become a place for those with a keen interest in the law to express and share their views and opinions on any high profile cases or legal matters".  There's not much coverage of intellectual property law, so any aspiring blogger who wants to write on IP topics for a general interest law blog should email Lucy here, preferably giving an account of themselves in the process. 

Writing client-facing material using English as a second language? The IPKat's friend Clodagh Phelan (Words with Wings), who has a love of literacy and a legal education, is offering a handy service for those members of the intellectual property fraternity who write newsletters, circulars, web content and suchlike in English even though it may be their second or third language.  Clodagh will give your text a professional "health-check" and a bit of a spring-clean too, since it's that time of year.  If you'd like to contact Clodagh and discuss this topic with her, you can do so by emailing her here.  Says the IPKat, this sort of service can be just as beneficial to people who are native English-speakers but who -- unlike their foreign counterparts -- have often had little or no chance to learn the rules.

Brüstle: a request for assistance. A reader has reminded the IPKat that, while the German Federal Court of Justice issued a final decision in the Brüstle case (docket nr. X ZR 58/07) on 27 November, 2012, following a ruling on a reference for the preliminary determination of questions put by that court to the Court of Justice of the European Union (here), there don't seem to be any convenient English-language versions of the German court's final decision. Does any reader have a good translation of this decision, or know where one can be found?  It would be great if we could rely on dictionaries and online translation programmes but, as Merpel points out, legal rulings are often highly nuanced and the use of dictionaries isn't always ever likely to bring out the deeper meaning of a page of legal reasoning.

London Marathon reminder.  Long-time Katfriend Bratin Roy (Google UK) is running again in this year's London Marathon.  The two charities for which he is collecting funds are Macmillan Cancer Support and Kankhal Medical Aid.  To make Bratin feel that it really is worth his while to do all that running -- and, remember, he doesn't get sponsored for all the training he has to do -- click here and you can make your donation.