That rather lovely 8,000,000 feeling. Some time on Saturday, while this Kat was putting up his paws and enjoying a little offline rest, this weblog notched up its eight millionth page-view. As always, when a milestone is reached, however arbitrary, it seems appropriate to offer a word or two of thanks to our readers for continuing to view our pages, for the various members of the team past and present who continue to fill those pages -- and to the legions of litigants, lawyers, policy-makers and other miscellaneous personages upon whose attitudes, activities and antics it's always worth making a comment or two. So, here goes: "Thanks again!"
Not the Royal Shakespeare Company. "RSC" triggers in many readers some happy thoughts of the Royal Shakespeare Company -- but by happy coincidence those letters also indicate the Royal Society of Chemistry. The latter's Law Group is running an event later this week on "IP Case Law" in Central London. While it's listed on the IPKat's Forthcoming Events page, the event is coming up so soon that this Kat thought it might be worth giving it a little nudge. If you have any friends who are scientifically oriented and want a bit of IP law that's dedicated to their interests and background, this might just be it. Click
here for further details.
The TPP: a summary. Since there have been various posts on the wikileaked text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement over the past week or so, this tidy-minded Kat thought it might help to list them for the benefit of anyone who was looking out for one and missed it:
* General Provisions (Alberto Bellan)
* Copyright (Angela Daly)
* Patents (Stefano Barazza)
* Trade marks (Alberto Bellan)
* Designs (Sarah Burstein)
Once again, a big thanks to our friends for providing these subject-specific analyses so swiftly and efficiently.
Around the weblogs 1. Via Roberto Ledesma (katpat!) of EverythingTrademarks.com comes this link to
this post on Morris Turek's YourTrademarkAttorney.com blog on some rather alarming research into Trademarkia's tendency to prompt users of its services to apply to register as trade marks signs that contain trivial changes from well known and (in the US at any rate) decidedly registered marks. Elsewhere Tania Phipps-Rufus's goss-IPgirl blog was pretty
quick off the mark with news of the partial revocation in the UK -- for non-use, no less -- of Gucci's iconic interlocking GG monogram.
Around the weblogs 2. "Living With Uncertainty" is the title of the editorial for the December 2013 issue of
JIPLP: you can read it for free on the journal's jiplp weblog
here. If you follow the Blogspot version of
MARQUES's Class 99 design law blog, beware: it will be disappearing in the next few days. Class 99 has relocated and now lives
here on the MARQUES website, next to its companion weblog, the
Class 46 European trade mark blog. SOLO IP's Michael Factor has some
lively things to say about solo patent attorneys filing their own patents and seeking to crowdsource their own funding. The normally quiet and peaceful
SPC Blog, tied to the narrow issues relating to patent term extension for pharma and agrichemical products, notched up an alarmingly busy nine posts last week -- the most it has ever managed in a single week since it was launched in 2008.
The TPP: a summary. Since there have been various posts on the wikileaked text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement over the past week or so, this tidy-minded Kat thought it might help to list them for the benefit of anyone who was looking out for one and missed it:
