Friday fantasies

Braving the mud: expect
the unexpected at Glastonbury ...

Around the weblogs 1.  Afro-IP reports on the sad and troubling case of Johan Nortje, the South African customs official who was murdered by a hit squad, calling for readers' help here.  On the SOLO IP blog, Barbara Cookson is first to comment, in "A Patent Agent's Duty of Care", on a long-running saga of an action seeking damages for negligence against a British patent attorney -- a case that raises important questions concerning what patent attorneys can do within the scope of their professional practice and of how the information they provide may be received by a client [one or more Kats may address this theme in due course, work and other pressing commitments permitting]. On the 1709 Blog Ben Challis, fresh [if anyone be described as such] from the Glastonbury Festival, resumes his CopyKat round-ups.  "Who are the good trolls? Or, how to monetize well?" is the theme of Mike Mireles's latest post for IP Finance, a blog that he has hugely enriched with his recent posts.  

Time for a spring-clean ...

Around the weblogs 2. It has been a busy week on the normally peaceful Class 99 design blog, whose founder David Musker gives a cheerful summary of the evidence of early activity of England and Wales's small claims track for resolving IP disputes. Among the other posts, there's news of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Hague Agreement spring-clean of the administrative arrangements for registration of designs internationally in an attempt to make the international design system that bit more relaxed.   MARQUES's companion blog, the Class 46 European trade mark blog, has not been idle either: Sani v Hani, Ilani and Rani is one of the more interestingly-named Community trade mark disputes to be reported this week by Laetitia Lagarde and friends, whjle Pedro Malaquias summarises the latest rules for getting your .pt national level domain.

From the IPKat's excellent and scholarly friend Dirk Visser (Klos Morel Vos & Schaap, among other things) comes a spot of news that will doubtless excite his copyright readers, if they don't know this already. On 17 June 2014, in a case between broadcasting organisation SBS and the Belgian collecting society Sabam, the Brussels Court of Appeal referred the following question to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU):

“Does a broadcasting organisation, which sends its programmes exclusively by means of direct injection, that is to say: a two-part process by which the program carrying signals are delivered in encoded form through satellite, glass fibre connection or any other means of transportation to distributors (satellite, cable or xDSL connection), without these signals during or because of this delivery being accessible to the public, and where subsequently these distributors send the signals to their subscribers so that these can view the programs, commit a communication to the public within the meaning of Article 3 of [the CopyrightDirective]?” (informal translation)

This Kat thanks Dirk both for the news and for the informal translation, since his Dutch is just a little on the rusty side (though he knows that the Dutch for "meow" is "miauw"). For those whose Dutch is better than his, you can access the Brussels Court of Appeal ruling here.

The Katpoll currently sitting at the top of this weblog's sidebar, another brainchild from Eleonora, asks if copyright law should make special provision in favour of user-generated content.  As of right now, over 300 responses have been received -- but there are only three days to go before the poll closes. If you are still anguishing about which way to cast your precious vote, now's the time to form a firm conclusion and make it count!