Thursday thingies

Western Europe

Who is a European? In recent Katpost which mentioned the announcement of a new eight-person team at the top to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Merpel observed that, if it wasn't for the fact that one of the Deputy Directors General, Anne Leer, hailed from Norway, Europe would be entirely unrepresented at the top of the WIPO tree.  Apparently this is not the case. That knowledgeable and vigilant Antipodean in exile, David Stone, writes to tell Merpel that curiously, for UN purposes, Australian fall within the category of “Western European and Others”. So WIPO is actually headed by a “European".

That parody exception again. Katfriend Camilla Turner has been busily writing an article posted online for The Telegraph on the United Kingdom's new parody exception, Perusing it, this Kat was delighted to see the names of two of his favourite fellow bloggers mentioned in it: fellow Kat Eleonora Rosati and the Glastonbury Festival's Ben Challis (both of whom also write for the copyright-only 1709 Blog).  He was also pleased to be introduced to another blog that he really ought to have known about but didn't: Stamp The Wax (co-edited by Aaron Levitt, whom Camilla's article also name-checked).  It's warmly reassuring to see how traditional newspapers and weblogs can complement one another when they share the same media space, each enriching the other.

Born to be a best seller? "Custard tarts, Biscuit Pixies, self-service checkouts and pirates" -- these are some of the topics that one might reasonably expect to encounter in the exciting world of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys Vice-President Andrea Brewster in her Not-so-Secret CIPA Diary. Many times has this Kat had sadly to advise bloggers not to give up their day jobs, but he is happy to make an exception in the case of Andrea: patent attorneys with a knack for creative writing in their technical field are two-a-penny, but those who can exercise the same creativity in writing about their daily life are pretty rare. Surely Andrea could make it as the Thinking Woman's Bridget Jones ...

Congratulations. Michael Factor's love-it-or-loathe-it IP Factor weblog ("Opinionated Intellectual Property News Blog with an Israeli Slant") held its 10th birthday party earlier this week; a note on the goings-on will be posted in due course on the SOLO IP blog, which Michael has been known to aid and abet.  On another planet, and a good deal less controversial, is the PatLit patent litigation blog which has just welcomed its 1,400th email subscriber.

Assiduous readers of this weblog's Forthcoming Events page will have spotted the Unified European Patent Court Conference on 21 October, organised by the Department of Business Administration (Aarhus University) and the Association of Danish Intellectual Property Attorneys (ADIPA) in the horrendously-named hendecasyllabic Radisson Blu Scandinavia Hotel, Copenhagen (click here for programme and registration details). The organisers have just contacted the IPKat to tell him that they've secured the keynote speaking services of Randall R. Rader (former Chief Judge of the US Federal Circuit) -- a major figure in the shaping of US patent law and a personality whose name's "R" motif is also now inextricably bound in with the words "recusal" and "resignation".