Wednesday whimsies

Hats off to design
for the future!
Once again the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is taking heed of the IPKat's exhortations. Just two short days after this weblog lamented that the world's favourite IP agency hadn't updated its World Intellectual Property Day website, it did (and the evidence is here). It would be churlish to complain when an international agency complies with the IPKat’s writ BUT, while the updated site now gives us this year’s theme (“Designing the future”) and a bit more to go on, there is none of the usual attractive artwork and downloads for the Kat to cut-and-paste. No copyright problems, we hope …


Not behind the times, like the WIPO might just occasionally be, but commendably ahead of it, is the Court of Justice of the European Union.  Remarkably, given its occasion bursts of inactivity, the Curia has updated its case law search page to 13 May 2011, as you can see by clicking here (this will only work until the correct is restored by the Curia reader who reads this blog, though he or she pretends not to ...).  This Kat thanks a fellow feline, Mark, for the pointer.


Around the blogs. It’s not often that you see a book review being vaunted as a masterpiece, but Chris Wadlow’s magnificent “Butterworths Book of Sand”, which you can find on jiplp, is a must for all who love patents and the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. The 1709 Blog carries a brief obituary for the notorious copyright infringement proceedings brought by the late Media CAT (no relation) against 26 named alleged porno-file-sharers.  The 15th episode of Cautious v IPOff, chronicled weekly by the PatLit weblog, can be perused here. IP Tango reports that Ecuador has affirmed the notion that intellectual property rights are constitutional rights, here, and there have been some developments in the investigation of the murder of customs officer and anti-counterfeit expert Johan Nortje, recorded here on Afro-IP.


Ontario, when
the snow melts
If Canada' patent law means something to you, now's your chance to have a say.  Information received from the Kat's old friend Andrea Rush (Heenan Blaikie) is that Canada's Patent Branch has begun consultation on Chapter 14 of its Manual of Patent Office Practice (MOPOP) which deals with Unity of Invention.  The draft revised Chapter 14 was released for public consultation on Monday and you can check it out here. Stakeholders have the opportunity to provide comments on the draft chapter until 7 April 2011, when the ice starts to thaw and Canadians turn their thoughts to spring. For more information, says Andrea, you can visit CIPO’s What'’s New website.


The IPKat has learned with sadness of the death of Michael Cohn late last month.  Michael took over the practice of his father's firm, Reinhold Cohn and :Partners, which he ran for some 40 years until he retired in 2000.  An active member of the AIPPI, he was also a knowledgeable and thoughtful soul with whom it was always a pleasure to share a discussion on IP or wider issues. He will be very much missed.
Wednesday whimsies Wednesday whimsies Reviewed by Jeremy on Wednesday, February 09, 2011 Rating: 5

3 comments:

  1. I couldn't resist seeing parallels between the works of Borges and my occupation as a patent examiner. Search examiners at The Hague could well be the true inhabitants of the biblioteca de Babel, at least back in the days of paper, since they endeavoured to find the perfect document in a mountain of nonsense stored in the corridors of a star-shaped building. Substantive examiners could also be forgiven to believe that certain applicant's arguments regarding novelty could have been paraphrased from the pages of "Pierre Ménard, autor del Quijote"...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Please don't forget World Book and Copyright Day, organised by UNESCO 23 April. Unfortunately, no news yet on the UNESCO website about plans for 2011.

    For some reason the UK and Irish have their World Book Day celebrations on 3 March and they have their plans in place: worldbookday.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Regarding CIPO's MOPOP review, I can't really see what the fundamental changes would be made, besides the addition of the reference to the PCT Guidelines. Can someone help or point to a background document on the issues at stake?

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Powered by Blogger.