Wednesday whimsies

The IPKat has heard that the National Federation for Corporate Law (the FNDE) has organized the Paris Congress on Industrial Property on the topic “Employee’s invention right: Asia - USA – Europe”, in collaboration with Strasbourg's leading IP centre CEIPI and the Center for Advanced Study & Research on Intellectual Property (CASRIP), University of Washington.  This conference will be held on 19 September 2014 in Paris, France. Click here for further information concerning the programme and registration, and here if you're looking for a bit of fun after the event.

Around the weblogs.  David Brophy posted his Katpost on Wilko v Buyology (a recent ruling on whether and, if so, when a trade mark owner can be refused an order that the defendant disclose details of the supplier of infringing goods), so quickly that new guest Kat Rebecca -- who had just written on the same decision -- was literally pipped at the post. No worry, Rebecca's analysis of this intriguing decision can now be found on SOLO IP, here.  Over on the 1709 Blog guest contributor Denise Vervoold, a native Dutch speaker, gives us some extra insights into the Advocate General's Opinion in Case C-201/13 Deckmyn, a big Court of Justice of the European Union reference on the legality of parody under the EU's irregularly-harmonised copyright laws.  On IP Finance, a notice of a forthcoming webinar on "10 challenges to valuing IP" is accompanied by a call for readers to send in their own suggested challenges to the valuation of IP -- a call which has so far been completely ignored by that blog's readers. PatLit writes up a recent England and Wales ruling by Mr Justice Birss, in Nampak v Alpla, on when the courts can safely dispense with expert evidence even in a patent trial.

"Seeking the Lost".  The UK Government's response to the technical consultation on orphan works -- all 37 pages of it -- has finally been posted online. The link comes from Gillian Spraggs (katpat!) and you can enjoy it at your leisure here. From its contents, which this Kat has briefly perused and to which he hopes to return in time to come, one gets the impression that Her Majesty's Finest are finally coming to the conclusion that if, even with the best search facilities available, it's not possible to find the author of a copyright work, there's a high likelihood that the author isn't going to be coming forward ...

Minesoft, a business the name of which the ever-so-slightly dyslexic Merpel persists in reading as Microsoft, has announced the launch of a brand new service for automatically monitoring newly published patent citations. So far as the Kats understand, patent citations can provide a valuable insight into competitor activity, not to mention opportunities and threats that attend areas of one's technological interest -- and this is where the tracking of patent citations comes in. According to Minesoft Director Ann Chapman:

“Organisations can use the new service in-house to monitor which competitors are citing their own patent portfolio, or to discover what technologies are most frequently being cited. IP law or patent attorney firms can expand their IP services offering by providing clients with a watch service based on CiteTracker results. With no comparable services currently available on the market, CiteTracker offers organisations a unique, time-saving business intelligence resource.”

So why track patent citations the old-fashioned way if you can get it done automatically? You can decide for yourself if it's worth it: just click here.