Friday fantasies

Have you checked out the IPKat's Forthcoming Events page lately? There are some recent additions, several of which offer enticing prospects of registration fee discounts for readers of this weblog. In case you missed it, you can find it just here.

IPT Ball.  This Kat has alluded on occasion (here and here) to the Intellectual Property Trainees' Ball, which takes place on 19 July in the sumptuous surroundings of Rosewood. He has been reliably told by the organisers that tickets for this event -- which is not confined to IP trainees -- are continuing to sell like hot cakes.  The booking form is here.  Enjoy!

Around the weblogs.  The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) now has its own blog, here. While EFPIA's interests obviously go further and wider than mere IP, it is reasonable to assume that pharma patents and other IP issues will get a reasonably frequent airing, so it's worth keeping an eye on.  Elsewhere, in "Picasso and Potato Chips", Mira T. Sundara Rajan regales 1709 Blog readers with the sad saga of art works that have a tendency to disintegrate when you try to move them and what this means for moral rights. Dave Berry, on PatLit, explains the fate of the latest attempt in the US to pass an anti-patent-troll law. The jiplp blog offers current intelligence notes by fellow Kat Eleonora and by Deborah Jackson respectively, soon to be published in print in JIPLP, on OSA (another European copyright sortie into hotel rooms) and laudatory foreign-language words as Australian trade marks. There has been some great stuff on Afro-IP too: Isaac Rutenberg tells the good news that utility model applications in Kenya are no longer subject to substantive examination, while Aurelia Schultz considers a discussion of the role of transparency in IP-flavoured trade treaties.


Dogged pursuit of royalty income?  "Adventures of Lupo! Author comes up with series of children's stories after she trademarks Kate's pet dog" is a Daily Mail story to touch the hearts of lovers of dogs, the British royal family and speculative business propositions based on IP.  Lupo is apparently the beloved pet dog of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the eponymous hero of Aby King's The Adventures of Lupo the Royal Dog: The Secret of Windsor Castle, which will be published in September. Three further stories and a range of merchandise will follow. According to the article:

"Ironically given the new book deal, William and Kate’s spokesman at first refused to even confirm their new pet’s existence, saying it was a ‘private matter’ - even though the Queen and other dog-loving members of the royal family happily release details of their animals on the royal website. ‘We don’t want to breach our own privacy,’ an aide said. There was then another month-long stand-off after royal aides also declined to reveal the puppy’s name. It eventually emerged after a seven-year-old boy simply asked the Duchess when she visited a primary school in Oxfordshire. After being handed a toy dog by young Abubakr Hussain, Kate said she would name it after her own pet, Lupo, which means Lupo in Italian and is a derivative of the Latin word for the animal". 

On the business side, the series has been acquired in the UK by international giant Hodder Children’s Books, which also publishes the oeuvre of Enid Blyton.  Miss King is reported to have registered Lupo as a trade mark.  The IPKat marvels at how appropriate it is that someone who is actually a King is exploiting the name and image of the royal pet. Merpel took a quick online peep at the UK IPO's database of trade marks and applications: while in her haste she missed this one, she did note that the word LUPO is already registered for rat poison, among other things.

Via the venerable Kat-patted Chris Torrero comes news of yet another chippie in the legal spotlight (for Monte Carlo chips click here) -- and once again it is the Daily Mail that is proving to be an indispensable part of every intellectual property lawyer's must-read material.  An article reports that The Only Way is Fish chip shop, in Ongar (Essex, England), received a warning letter from  The Only Way is Essex ("Towie") producers Lime Pictures, which maintained that the shop had breached copyright [Ouch! Ouch! says IP purist Merpel. For one thing, one "infringes" copyright, not "breaches" it; for another, there's no copyright in a name, though there may be registered or unregistered trade mark rights] by using 'The Only Way is' in its name.  The fish shop owners have vowed to fight the warning, saying it is 'against human rights'.

CopyCamp change.  The forthcoming CopyCamp event, described on the 1709 Blog here, has changed its dates. Originally running from 23 to 24 October, it is now scheduled for 6 and 7 November.  You can check out the details for yourself here.  This Kat, when writing about CopyCamp on the 1709 Blog, noted "the commitment to discussion which is "multi-sided, balanced and unrestrained" and wondered how easily these criteria would be fulfilled -- especially if the pro-copyright side in the great debate were unrepresented or under-represented". He has since received an email from the organisers which emphasises their commitment to making sure that all sides of the debate are properly represented, and he thanks them for taking the trouble to spell this out.