Friday fantasies

The IPKat can hardly believe how quickly Friday has come around again. Well, before you disappear for a weekend of unrelieved leisure, don't forget to check out all the events listed in the IPKat's side bar.


First, the IPKat would like to say a huge thank-you to all his readers who responded to the request for information concerning the Mysterious Canon case, referred from Bulgaria to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling but deemed "manifestly inadmissible" by a very rude court.

Right: overwhelmed by the response, the IPKat peeps out from under his paperwork to see if it's safe to come out yet ...

Initially he replied to every email received, but the volume of helpful responses eventually got the better of him so please, if you wrote in but didn't get a personal response, please accept this as the Kat's thanks. A special mention should also go to Ventsi Stoilov who is, so far as the Kat can tell, the only Bulgarian to respond.


IP transaction guru and blogger Neil Wilkof is teaming up with Robert Anderson to hold a seminar, "Protection of trade and other secrets: a property right, equitable right or contractual obligation? Does it matter?" The date: Monday 14 December; the venue: Lovells LLP's London office. CPD points and mince pies available. For full details click here. To attend, email Sarah Turner here.

Around the weblogs. The IP Finance weblog team has just been strengthened by the arrival of tax expert and author Anne Fairpo. A pupil barrister at Atlas Chambers, having previously been a solicitor for more years than she cares to recall, an is a corporate tax advocate and adviser, specialising in technology-based business and international tax planning and transactions.


TMView. A test version of OHIM's TMview, providing free access to more than 5 million trade marks, is attracting favourable comment from people who have been playing with it over the past week or so. This new service is designed to search, free of charge, the databases of existing trade marks held by OHIM, WIPO, and the UK, Czech, Italian, Benelux, Portuguese and Danish IP Offices -- simultaneously. Trade mark data from eight other European IP Offices should be available between the end of 2009 and early 2010, promises OHIM, with the prospect of more later. You can play with it too, here.

Thanks are due to ...

* Edwina Baddeley, for this link to the sad (unless you're Apple) demise of iPodRip as a descriptor/brand name for what has since become iRip;

* Robin Fry (Beachcroft), for his firm's press release on the UK's Digital Economy Bill which contains the delightful line: "There will be consternation in Soho and confusion in Shoreditch" -- a vivid bit of prose to liven up the drab world of IP press releases;

* Annsley the AmeriKat for this eloquent use of YouTube as a medium for the written word, by an author who has some reservations regarding Lord Mandelson's current proposals.