Friday favourites

Fancy a change of scene? Why not check out the Forthcoming Events column on the IPKat's side bar? If an event is FREE, he's listing it in blue. The Kat is also listing things that aren't formal events, but which are just plain interesting: these are in green. IPKat-supported events are red. If there's a discount, it's in this colour.


Bye, bye Butterworths? Not quite ...  According well-informed sources close to Chancery Lane, from tomorrow the company currently known by the somewhat unlovely and cumbersome name LexisNexis Butterworths (LNB) will be renamed LexisLibrary.  According to LNB's e-burst email circular, the re-naming is part of the launch of Lexis Legal Intelligence; the change "will have no impact on the functionality of the service, your usernames, passwords or the login page".  This move is "part of the consistent naming structure for core components of the new Lexis Legal Intelligence offering that was launched earlier this month". However,

"LexisNexis continues to be committed to the Butterworths brand, which during its long history has come to stand for authoritative, comprehensive and expert legal commentary ..." [Adds Merpel, not to mention poverty if you buy them, fear of missing something if you don't, enlarged appendices and a heightened hernia risk if you try to lift the darned things].

The IPKat's friend Karla Hughes is currently doing some research at Fordham University under the supervision of Professor Hugh Hansen (left) on the subject of Community design law.  To this end she has prepared a short (8 question) questionnaire to identify the extent to which practitioners actually come into contact with design issues. This questionnaire is currently hosted here on Class 46, the European trade mark blog.  If you'd like to help Karla by completing the questionnaire, she'd be quite thrilled.  You can also thrill the design-consious Merpel by telling her behind which designer shades Professor Hansen is preserving his cool ...(please post your answers below: no prize except the satisfaction of being right!)

Now for a little news from around the blogs (you might choke on what you read on them, but at least they don't occupy any shelf space):

* Congratulations to The SPC Blog, which continues to gain momentum despite its astonishingly niche subject-matter (supplementary protection certificates and term extension for certain pharmaceutical, paediatric and agrichemical patents). The SPC Blog's email subscriber list now stands at a remarkable 402 readers, having passed the magic quatrocentenery overnight.

* Also going in the right direction, though rather more discreetly, is Datonomy, the data protection weblog which has now notched up its 100th email subscriber.  Datonomy is gearing itself up for wider European coverage, having added Berlin-based Karen Sokoll and Christoph Enaux to the team as well as Simon Bernholt.