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Friday flowerings

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

Do please check the IPKat's lovingly updated 'Forthcoming Events' feature, which you will find in the left-hand side-bar of this weblog's front page. It contains some fresh entries which you may not yet have seen.

Yesterday the IPKat posted an item ("Beauty, Beast and Hunchback score dramatic victory") about a German ruling that the producer of ?The Musical Starlights of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Disney Musical Productions? had infringed Disney's dramatic performance rights in works for which, it was assumed, the German collecting society GEMA had already given sufficient licences. One of the Kat's readers is BURSTING WITH CURIOSITY to know the defendant was. Can any of this blog's German readers enlighten him? If you know, please email team member Jeremy here.

Three separate dates and a venue have now been fixed for the afternoon courses on good writing techniques for intellectual property law. The dates are Monday 3 November 2008, Monday 1 December 2008 and Thursday 8 January 2009. The venue is the Brockway Room in central London's historical Conway Hall (left), near Holborn tube station. The courses cover good writing style, the use of IP writing conventions, the structuring of articles, case notes and other materials, and there are two "practicals" -- the first is an exercise in critically reviewing a piece of published material. The second is a take-home exercise in writing a short note, which will be marked. The charge is only £85 plus £14.88 VAT, making a total of £99.88. If you'd like to attend, email IPKat team member Jeremy here and he'll book you in.

Like exotic butterflies, legal decisions on the extension of patent term through the grant of a supplementary protection certificate are fairly rare and highly prized. Gilead Science managed to win an appeal against an refusal to grant an SPC for a tenofovir patent, thanks to Mr Justice Kitchin. Enthusiasts for this recondite area of IP can read all about it here.

Is there room for yet another copyright-specific weblog? Yes says engineer-turned-lawyer Simon Bradshaw, whose LawClanger blog launched yesterday with a detailed critique of some curiosities of Mr Justice Mann's judgment in a case involving copyright in Imperial Stormtrooper helmets. Good luck, Simon, says the IPKat.

Cuil or Google? The publicity splash for the launch of search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool") tempted the IPKat -- vain as ever -- to try it out and see if it's as good as it claims. Empirical tests involving some of his favourite words produced the following results:

* IPKat (Cuil: 92,074; Google: 72,200)
* Merpel (Cuil: 1,475; Google: 8,490)
* OHIM (Cuil: 130,397; Google: 128,000)
* WIPO (Cuil: 1,943,869 ; Google: 3,930,000)
* Infringement (Cuil: 10,785,196; Google: 37,200,000)

The IPKat says he'll shift to Cuil, but Merpel has no intention of doing so.

Full post as published by IPKat on August 01, 2008 (boomark / email).