Friday fantasies

Merpel's mischievous thought: if the Kat's Google
Site has been white-listed, does that give
him free rein to violate the terms of use ...?

Not such a toxic Kat after all!  If you've clicked a link from an IPKat post and discovered that it doesn't work, you may have been thwarted by the sudden, dramatic decision of Google to suspend the IPKat' Google Site for violation of Google's terms of use.  When the IPKat discovered that this had happened, he checked carefully through the terms of use and was satisfied that he was a responsible, inoffensive Site user.  After clicking the "Appeal" button twice and getting no response, he contacted a wise, handsome and sentient human within the organisation who was able to ask the Google team to investigate.  Yesterday he received the following response:

"... it seems that the site was incorrectly marked as spam in an automated review. They've fixed this and white-listed the site for future reviews. Hope this helps, and apologies for the inconvenience this caused"

The IPKat nobly accepts Google's apologies and offers his own to the many readers who, in turn, have inconvenienced him by writing to complain about all those documents they've not been able to access.

While on the subject of terms of use ... this Kat did not receive an e-greeting from the UK's Copyright Licensing Agency this year, though he assumes that it's nothing personal since he receives lots of news from the CLA.  One of the Kat's friends did however receive this year's greeting, illustrated on the right.  This friend, who prefers on this occasion to remain anonymous, wonders if anyone else noticed the little bit at the bottom left-hand side of the greeting -- the bit with the image of a small but unmistakably red bird, in the familiar shape of the Twitter bird logo.

Now, it's quite possible that the CLA has negotiated something with Twitter and that there is nothing untoward about the little red bird.  However, if you visit the web page entitled Twitter Trademark and Content Display Policy and scroll down to the logo's terms of use ("Using the Twitter brand and trademarks"), you will find the following list of no-nos:

"Don't: 

Use speech bubbles or words around the bird.
Rotate or change the direction of the bird.
Animate the bird.
Duplicate the bird.
Change the color of the bird.
Use any other marks or logos to represent our brand".

Red faces, anyone?

Victoria Beckham
supports the Kat ...

Around the weblogs. Following a nudge from Chirs Torrero, this Kat finally found his way to a fascinating piece on Steve van Dulken's enjoyable and well-informed The Patent Search Blog, "Brand Beckham: designs and trade marks registered by David and Victoria", which you can enjoy here.  Two recent posts on IP Finance, both authored by IPKat bloggers, invite attention: Neil discusses the 25-year gap between barcodes being patented and their commercialisation, while Jeremy questions the utility of royalty rate guides. The first four in this year's series of authors whose works fall out of copyright in 2013 in life-plus-70-year countries, on the 1709 Blog, have now been posted: Stefan Zweig, Akiko Yosano, Walter Sickert and L. M. Montgomery ('Anne of Green Gables'). Finally, Henning Hatwig treats Class 99 readers to a short, sharp, design lawyer's perspective on the now-notorious Gold Bear trade mark decision of the Cologne District Court.