Tuesday tiddlywinks

But would he satisfy
today's standards ...?

Forthcoming happenings.  The IPKat's Forthcoming Events page is often mentioned in despatches; it lists all sorts of conferences, forums, seminars, lectures and the like.  It doesn't usually list happenings, though.  One such happening is a gathering of like-minded IP enthusiasts that is scheduled to occur spontaneously on the late afternoon of Tuesday 1 September, when fellow blogger Michael Factor (The IP Factor, here) will be passing through the hallowed portals of The Old Nick, Sandland Street, Holborn -- deep in the heart of Charles Dickens' Legal London -- to discuss IP practice and professional ethics with an enthusiastic bunch of random colleagues between the hours of 5 and 7 pm.  This Kat will be there  Do feel free to join us. No need to RSVP; just pop in and be social!


Good prospect looks for a placement or training contract: can you help? A young and talented friend of the IPKat, who is hoping to make his way in the legal profession in the UK, has asked the Kats to help him find the right place to start. His particulars are, in brief, as follows:

A Swedish native speaker and recent law graduate from the University of Southampton (Upper Second Class Honours) with a keen interest in intellectual property, he is currently an LLM student reading European Intellectual Property Law at Stockholm University.  

During his stay in Southampton, he was involved in several extra-curricular activities. Among other things, he took part and won the contest organised by his intellectual property lecturer [fellow Kat Eleonora], consisting of analysing a recent topical High Court decision on the law applicable to online copyright infringements. This was published in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice. He also won the Shoosmiths Gerald Dworkin Prize for the best performance in the sit-down intellectual property law exam, as well as the prize for Outstanding Contribution to the Law School. In addition, he recently had a 4,000 word contribution on women’s reproductive rights accepted for publication in the prestigious European Human Rights Law Review.

With experience as a paralegal and as a qualified victim & witness service support professional in Sweden, he now intends to pursue a career in the UK, and is looking for a placement and/or training contract with a UK law firm.

If you would like to contact our friend, please email the IPKat at theipkat@gmail.com with the subject line 'Potential Person'.

Around the weblogs 1.  PatLit features an extremely helpful and accessible introduction to the mysteries of partial priority and poisonous provisionals before the European Patent Office, in the form of a guest blogpost from Carpmael & Ransford's David Holland.   Another guest post -- this time from Katfriend Kevin Winters -- appears on IP Finance in the form of a detailed analysis of the recent US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling in Microsoft's complex RAND patent licence dispute with Motorola. The same weblog also offers some comments on Brand Finance CEO David Haigh's initial take on the Google-to-Alphabet corporate restructure-cum-rebrand operation.  And here's a guest post by Molly Torsen Stech for Art & Artifice, thoughtful piece on the art of protecting design.

Around the weblogs 2.  beSpacific is always full of fascinating information about information: here the award-winning blog draws attention to the US Social Security Death Master File; while this database of all Americans dying from 1936 is intended mainly do deal with identity thefts and social security frauds, copyright lawyers may have the bright idea of adding a few decades to the year of death to see whether the deceased's works of authorship have plopped into the public domain.   Meanwhile, moving from the dead to the never-existing, the Aistemos IP analytics blog has some sharp criticisms for people who go fishing for the IP-related business (and indeed any business) from SMEs using for bait those increasingly annoying if well-nigh irresistible formulaic lists ("5 things you have to know ...", "10 things you mustn't do .." etc.), reminding them that there's no such thing as a typical SME. 

Codfather battered. Several readers, the first of whom was Amalyah Keshet (Head of Image Resources & Copyright Management, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem: Katpat!), have drawn the attention of members of the IPKat blog team to the decision of Paramount Pictures to send a cease-and-desist letter to the proprietors of The Codfather Takeaways fish and chip restaurant, which you can read all about on Techdirt here. Apparently there is a concern that the cartoon fish on the shop's signage is a misappropriation of the image of The Godfathers character Don Corleone, as portrayed by Marlon Brando (or should that be Marlin Brando?).  This is not the first time a fish and chip shop has been targeted by a humourless, misanthropic intellectual property owner: the failed attempt by the Monte Carlo hotel and casino folk to force a name-change on a chippie in County Monaghan, Ireland, is still fresh in this Kat's mind. Maybe the time has come for a carve-out from intellectual property rights in favour of witty and harmless names for fish and chip shops, hairdressers, pubs and so on.