Conference and competition reminder

There are now just three weeks to the Thirteenth Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference. Organised by CLT and endorsed by the IPKat (team blogger Jeremy is by longstanding tradition in the chair), this event is held in Central London on Thursday 29 January and is packed full of excitement.

This year's programme has 10 individual speakers, a Celebrity Panel discussion and ends with a sponsored cocktail reception. Although it would be invidious to single out any of the speakers for special mention, this programme has some novelties this time around:

* Dawn Osborne (Rouse) offers the latest wisdom on internet-related trade mark infringements, ketwords, adwords and internet auctions;

* Ian Karet (Linklaters) will be laying bare some of the mysteries of patent infringement in the light of recent case law, also touching on the ongoing battle for the heart of software patents;

* Joel Barry (Olswang) is presenting some perspectives on current trade mark infringement, not forgetting the recent European Court of Justice ruling in Intel v CPM;

* Sean Dennehey (IPO) considers the road to IP reform following the Gowers Report and how the Intellectual Property Office has been engaged in this process;

* A panel of IP celebrity experts will be coming to discuss some of the latest issues.

You can read all the programme details and speakers' biographies, and find the booking form, if you click here. In previous years this event has been well worthwhile and highly rated by participants. See you there?

There's also a competition, for which the prize is free registration for this conference.  Now that the fight against counterfeits and IP infringements has become one of the major issues of our time and Superman, Batman etc have failed to defeat the evil perpetrators, readers are invited to invent some new Superheroes who might just do the job. Please send your entries (more than one entry per person is fine) to the IPKat here, with the subject line Superheroes -- and, please, no SuperKat... Closing date, next Thursday 15 January 2009. You don't have to attend the conference in order to enter the competition ...