Monday miscellany

Well done, CIPA.  Readers of the PatLit weblog will already have spotted a short note on the decision of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) in the United Kingdom to reduce the registration fee for this year's annual Congress on 1 and 2 October by a full 25% -- not just for IPKat readers but for everyone else too.  This Kat is delighted at this wise move, which is sensitive to the needs of many patent attorneys who have difficult decisions to make as to which events to attend. 

Around the weblogs. "You say tomato, I say long-term industrial strategy" is the challenging title of Mark Anderson's latest post on IP Draughts on the Dowling Review -- another UK Government study that has been commissioned on how universities and businesses can work better together. Not heard of it? You're not the only one.  The Neighbors are back on Art & Artifice, thanks to a post by Rosie Burbidge with an assist from Molly Stech on this controversial privacy v creativity issue.  Over on the 1709 Blog, fellow Kat Eleonora articulates her thoughts on the EU's Digital Single Market Strategy: will it be fully harmonised or not?  There's also a gripping post by Andy Johnstone on the UK Intellectual Property Office's orphan work licensing scheme, Class 46 carries a further, fairly detailed account of the goings-on in the Diplomatic Conference on the Lisbon Agreement on appellations of origin and geographical indications -- you can almost smell the intrigue. 


Something to read 1. Intellectual Property And General Legal Principles: Is IP a Lex Specialis? That's the title of a new title in Edward Elgar Publishing's ATRIP Intellectual Property series which has reached this Kat, who has not yet had the chance to review it. ATRIP --full title  'International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property -- has come a long way since its foundation back in the early 1980s and is now producing some fascinating and thought-provoking material (a far cry from the days when we didn't get much further than simply telling one another "that's what you do, but this is what we do ..."). Anyway, according to the book's web-blurb:

The rule of lex specialis serves as an interpretative method to determine which of two contesting norms should be used to govern [it does, says Merpel, but only if you let it]. In this book, the lex specialis label is broadly applied to intellectual property and connects a series of questions: What is the scope of intellectual property law? What is the relationship between intellectual property law and general legal principles? To what extent are intellectual property laws exceptional?

The volume is edited by Graeme B. Dinwoodie (Professor of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law, University of Oxford) and features contributions from more Katfriends than can be named here. You can check it out here. 


Something to read 2. Also in this Kat's in-tray but not yet reviewed is The SAGE Handbook of Intellectual Property, edited by Matthew David (Durham University, UK) and Debora Halbert (University of Hawaii at Manoa). A quick perusal shows that this is not a Handbook in the sense of a manual or practitioners' how-to-do-it guide and it's far too big to hold in the hand. Nor does it provide any sort of systematic explanation or analysis of IP on a topic-by-topic or jurisdictional basis.  Rather, it is a collection of stand-alone chapters.  Further research indicates that there are over 200 SAGE Handbooks on different topics, of which this is but one, and that most do not appear to be on legal topics. Having said that, the list of contributors is long and contains many authors whose work is not only known to this Kat but which has in the past been edited by him and which he knows to be of a good standard. This Kat looks forward to exploring its contents more closely when the opportunity arises. Meanwhile you can check this title out here.