Monday miscellany

Refreshments will
be provided ...

Have you signed up yet?  The IPKat's 10th Birthday Seminar on Wednesday 12 June now has over 280 registrants and the venue -- the lovely auditorium in the AmeriKat's London office of Allen & Overy LLP -- only holds 310.  If you'd like to join us and share our discussion of IP and the Social Media, you'd better not leave it too late!  The speakers, who are drawn from the ranks of Kats past and present, will be looking at how the social media affect, and are affected by, not just the usual copyright and trade marks but patents too -- and we'll even have a bit of Katonomics on offer. Further, to whet your appetite, the IPKat and Merpel are pleased to announce that they have some special guests lined up for the panel session, but they're not yet letting on who they might be.

If we can't raise the fare,
this is how we'll get
Martin to Dallas for INTA

Send a Slovak: an update.  After a slow start, the IPKat's appeal for funding to support fellow blogger and talented young IP scholar Martin Husovec is starting to gather momentum.  However, Martin is still some way short of the US$ 1,850 which is needed in order for him to get to Dallas for this year's International Trademark Association (INTA) Meeting to and stay there long enough to be able to give his paper on in rem injunctions (on which you can see the abstract here).  If you have been considering making a donation but have not yet done so, please contact the IPKat here and let him know.  While on the subject of INTA, this Kat looks forward to attending this year's Meeting (Neil will be there too) and he can generally be found at the annual Meet the Bloggers session. He doesn't have any venue details, but he has heard rumours that the meeting will be held on Monday evening, 6 May, commencing at 8pm.

When Bud hits the buffers.  The IPKat's resident expert in the affairs of the higher echelons of the British judiciary informs him that litigation in the UK in the honest concurrent use dispute of Budejovicky Budvar Narodni Podnick v  Anheuser-Busch Inc (noted by the IPKat here) is not going any further.  The Supreme Court has declined to hear the matter, even though the Notice of Appeal was apparently the longest ever submitted to that noble and esteemed court. In refusing permission to appeal, the triumvirate of Lords Neuberger, Mance and Wilson gave as their sixth reason the following:

"As to the allegations of unfairness in paragraph 68 of the Notice of Appeal – including unfortunate, though clearly light-hearted, comments made by Sir Robin Jacob about the quality of beer at the initial hearing in 2009, and about the Court of Justice and the drafters of the Trade Marks Directive - the Supreme Court sees no prospect of any of them establishing a basis for setting aside the Court of Appeal’s judgment, nor do they involve matters of general public importance".

There are those who quibble with Sir Robin's judgments, and those who take issue with his post-judicial expert witness role, but when it comes to comments about beer, the Court of Justice and the drafters of the Trade Mark Directive, the learned Professor will be relieved to know that his words resonate with many of this weblog's readers.

Around the weblogs.  Today's Afro-IP post from the ever-restless Kingsley Egbuonu takes him to Mozambique, where he reports that the country's IP Office website is actually being kept up-to-date.   Travelling around in cyberspace, and covering as much ground as Kingsley, is Katfriend Miri Frankel who, having only just penned a guest post for PatLit on the SHIELD anti-troll draft bill in the United States, popped up in quite a different area of IP with "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Copyright Expiration Date", here.  Meanwhile. over on SOLO IP, Barbara Cookson was writing about that issue which, many folk hoped, had all been resolved: the extent to which injunctions to stop patent infringement are just optional or pretty well mandatory.