Monday miscellany

A welcome guest at our Birthday Seminar

Arrangements for the IPKat's 10th Birthday Seminar next Wednesday continue apace. Last week we first revealed the identity of two of our panellsts -- Darren Smyth and Mark Schweizer.  On Friday the IPKat tweeted the identities of two further panellists.  One was none other than Judge Joachim Bornkamm, who will be joining us for our birthday celebrations before he heads off to deliver this year's Sir Hugh Laddie Lecture at UCL. Joachim is the inspirational judge who heads the German Bundesgerichtshof's intellectual property appeals senate.  Another was Geert Glas, who is responsible for host firm Allen & Overy LLP's Global IP Practice: Geert chairs the Benelux Council for Intellectual Property, which advises the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property (BOIP) on all aspects of IP legislation. There is one further panellist whose identity we are now pleased to reveal: none other than Francis Gurry, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization and Secretary-General of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants.  This Kat holds Francis in great esteem and is delighted to welcome him to the Birthday Seminar.

Pity poor Anheuser-Busch. First, having chosen Budweiser as the name of a beer manufactured a long, long way from Budweis, the company found itself embroiled in litigation against a Czech brewery from the little town of Budweis. Now, having chosen the name Belle-Vue for a brand, it finds itself facing unwelcome competition from microbrewery Belleville.  Would you confuse the two? The full tale can be read in last week's Daily Mail here,  The Belleville bunch are parents of children at the Belleville school in Wandsworth, London, who are now prudently looking for a new name. Says Merpel: the funny thing is that most serious beer drinkers didn't confuse the two Budweisers, despite their identical names, because they knew that there were two beers of the same name and could tell them apart. However, because neither Belle-Vue nor Belleville are so well known and they are quite similar, confusion is likely -- at least if they are ordered by phone.  A katpat to Gerry Gavigan for alerting us to this item.

Remaining with alcoholic beverages, here's a dispute involving the name Champagne but which has nothing to do with alcoholic beverages: a Japanese band by the name of Champagne has been accused of stealing the "future frames" technique for editing video footage from Australian band Clubfeet.  Links to the Clubfeet's video (on YouTube) and Champagne's (no longer on YouTube and marked "temporarily unavailable") can be found here. It appears however that the same technique -- whether legally protected or not -- was already out there as early as 2010.  Is there IP protection for a technique for editing video footage, and should there be? This Kat expects that many of his readers have firm positions on these issues.

The IPKat wonders what, if anything, will be the impact of the ruling of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) adjudication against Trademark Renewal Service Ltd, this company being one of the scammers that seek to extract money from regular businesses by sending out renewal letters that create the impression that they are official.  Upholding the complaint made against the company, the ASA simply concludes that its future mailing should not go out in its current form, which implies that "it was official correspondence from a company affiliated with the IPO". This Kat thinks that it should not be difficult for the company to comply with that request and still tempt businesses to part unnecessarily with unconscionable sums of money. A katpat goes to Chris Rycroft for supplying this link.