Friday fantasies

Forthcoming events. Still they come, one after another in an apparently never-ending quest to provide a little entertainment, education and inspiration for IP enthusiasts who need to get away from their desks for a bit: every week we are adding more events to the IPKat's Forthcoming Events page, some of which are free or carry quite decent reductions in the registration fee for the benefit of IPKat readers. Please do check this page out here.

Around the weblogs 1. A guest post on the 1709 Blog is the explanation for the canine artwork that appears on the right: it's a guest blogpost by Dutch IP lawyer and enthusiast Denis Verdoold (Banning) on a copyright action premised on the copyright protectability of Boo, the popular Pomeranian internet sensation. The jiplp weblog features Emir Crowne's guest editorial for the November issue of JIPLP on the latest Canadian perspectives on exhaustion of rights,  What should happen in European Patent Office appeals where the appellant erroneously underpays the appeal fee? The latest in a recent string of fascinating PatLit posts by Michael Thesen reviews the pros and cons of decision T0595/11. The Class 99 design law blog relates a recent Danish decision, apparently under appeal, that would give the owner of a registered Community design a remarkably wide scope of protection, covering even the two-dimensional reproduction of a sanitary waste-bin design in order to show that it could accommodate bin-liners of manufacturers other than the maker of the bin maker itself.

Around the weblogs 2. Changing the subject completely, Michael Factor's IP Factor blog reviews a successful action brought against a proprietary pharma company by a generic competitor for unjust enrichment, the act complained of being the evergreening of clopidogrel-bisulphate. The estate agents' blog SellingUp features a battle between leading online estate agents eMoov and smaller sound-alike competitor eMove, which has spilled over into the wonderful world of Community trade mark applications, with eMoov seeking to register the word mark EMOVE.  Finally, Aistemos takes a look at the astonishingly large number of patents held for beers and beer-related technology: who owns them, where -- and why?

Farewell, old friend.  This Kat has heard through the excellent grapevine of IP publishers and editors, of which he is part, that LexisNexis is to cease publication of one of its specialist series of law reports, the Butterworths IP & T Cases (the IP & T), which will be closing at the end of this year. While this series will now cease publication, all cases reported in the series [1999] to [2015] IP & T will continue to exist as an archival source on LexisLibrary. While the closure of this series was probably inevitable -- it seems to this Kat that the free and usually instant availability online of practically all the law reports and office decisions you are ever likely to need is not easy to compete with -- the series had a sleek, shiny feel to it and looked impressively businesslike.