Monday miscellany

IPKat 10th birthday seminar. This Kat reminds readers that the IPKat's 10th birthday seminar on IP and the Social Media takes place on Wednesday, 12 June 2013, when some 300+ good folk will be joining a selection of Kats past and present for an afternoon of celebration, stimulation and jolly hard thinking.  Not everyone will have noted the slight change in time, since the IPKat and Merpel brought the programme forward by half an hour in order to accommodate another event taking place in the same city later that day. Please check here for details of the programme and its current running schedule. The event is kindly hosted by Allen & Overy LLP in its London office (click here for address and map). The seminar is booked out but, if you are on the waiting list, don't lose hope -- there are always some poor souls who miss out at the last  minute! If you have emailed Annsley about your registration and are awaiting a response, do be patient: she will get back to you as fast as her little paws will permit.

LES: from Ming
to Minford

China on a plate? On Thursday 30 May, which is only just around the corner, the Scottish branch of the Licensing Executives Society Britain & Ireland is holding a meeting entitled "China IP strategy guide for 2013". This Kat assumes that this event, hosted by Pinsent Masons in the grand old city of Edinburgh, Scotland, is nothing to do with planning your crockery purchases from the latest Villeroy & Boch catalogue since the two presenters -- Luke Minford (Rouse) and James Brodie (China-Britain Business Council) -- are better known for their IP expertise than for their affection for Luxembourgeois tableware. Anyway, if you'd like to hear what they have to say on this subject, it's not too late to register. Just click here.

Les travaux:
digging deep
foundations

La Ligue internationale du droit de la concurrence (LIDC) has set up an ad hoc committee to comment in the public consultation of the European Commission on the draft Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation and the draft Technology Transfer Guidelines. This submission can be found on the LIDC website here. The LIDC hopes that this submission will make a useful contribution to the travaux préparatoires of the new Regulation, which straddles the borders of competition law and IP -- and which will become law without the need for any adaption or legislation by the EU's soon-to-be-28 Member States..

Away in Bangkok, life at ESCAP, the regional headquarters of the United Nations, life under the scorching South East Asian sun is becoming more  interesting by the day - at least for local IPRs enthusiasts. For a year or so, Katfriend Teemu Alexander Puutio has been working on establishing and running a knowledge-sharing platform on IPRs which would work for the benefit of policy-makers and researchers in the region and ultimately help steer the regional policies on IPRs towards increased rationality, sustainability and efficiency [from this you can see that Teemu is an enthusiast ...]. Most recently we have released a working paper on how IPRs appear in free trade agreements in the Asia and the Pacific, and we make an attempt at grading the agreements in terms of their significance. The IPKat is happy to give this document some air, if only so that intelligent comment can be passed on it. Readers can find it here.

No, Roger doesn't
look like this -- but
an internet search
for him threw up
this enchanting
image ...

A  press release from the UK's Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) reports that new CIPA President, seasoned IP campaigner and Katfriend Roger Burt, has called on the patent attorney profession to help legislators to ‘moderate potential harm’ of new national and international patent laws:

“We need help to better follow and identify the proposed changes, work out the likely consequences, and moderate the harm the changes might make", 

adding

"We need to bring in professional expertise to help design and implement high quality training as patent attorneys and providing education to keep all our members at the top of their game”.

This Kat, who has followed CIPA for many years, is impressed at Roger's statement that help is needed. An admission that help is required is too often seen as a concession of weakness, rather than as a constructive recognition of how to begin to improve things.  Merpel adds: in one of those What-Harvard-Business-School-Never-Tells-You books, the author stated that there are three things which, if you can't say them, you will never succeed: they are "I don't know", "I was wrong" and "I need help". One out of three is an encouraging start.

A Katpat goes to Ben Challis (Glastonbury Festival, Music Law Updates and 1709 Blog) for this link to "Chris Hadfield, 'Space Oddity,' and copyright law in space", posted to Science and Space by Mark Whittington last week. The event that triggered this piece was the performance by the Canadian astronaut of the Dave Bowie classic in space. You can compare Chris Hadfield's version with Dave Bowie's original. More to the point, did was a licence to perform sought and obtained from the copyright owner -- and was such licence even required, given the location of the performance?  Readers' comments are of course welcome.