Friday flappings

It's Friday again, time to check the IPKat's sidebar for all those forthcoming events. There's a huge selection, as ever. See you there?


Around the blogs. The 1709 Blog, which launched in April of this year and focuses on copyright law and business issues, is please to welcome its 300th email subscriber. Meanwhile, remarkably, niche patent extension weblog The SPC Blog has now just secured its 600th email subscriber -- and its blog team had no idea there were even 600 people on the planet who wanted to know the technical details of supplementary protection certificates and pharma patent prolongation. Finally the bilingual IP Tango Latin-American blog is continuing to build up its repertoire of Rio 2016 Olympic Games news and comments.


The IPKat has just been reading about a new startup, Trademarkia.com, which is still in its infant stage having been born only last month. Trademarkia claims to have built "the first and largest library of 5.7 million logos, names, and slogans anywhere on the Internet by leveraging public information". Says co-founder and V-P for Marketing Fred Smith:

"People who are looking to create a new business name, slogan, or logo now have a unique new way to get creative ideas and inspiration for new marks. Trademarkia has also created a unique way to automate and simplify state and federal trademark registrations and monitoring".

Says the IPKat, if it only stops IP professionals constantly returning to those accursed lightbulb motifs for their logo inspiration, Trademarkia will have achieved something.


IP Hall of Fame. The IPKat has been informed that nominations have again opened for new entrants to the IP Hall of Fame. If you'd like to make any nominations, or just browse the celebrities who have been elected so far, you can visit the Hall of Fame website here. Presumably, following the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama, you can nominate people who haven't yet made their mark on intellectual property if there's a good chance that, through their election, they eventually will ...

Shameless? In what he describes as a "shameless act of self-promotion" the otherwise modest and bashful Iain Russell (Brookes Batchellor LLP) asks to draw the attention of the IPKat's readers to a set of notes for P3 [this is the point at which non-patent people stop reading] that he prepared and which has been made available at no cost on the JEB website here. He adds:

"The notes are specifically aimed at helping with P3, rather than just drafting in general. As you'll see, the notes include extracts from recent Examiners' Comments and from the Manual of Patent Practice as well as some of my own comments and anecdotes. I hope to add a lot more material to them over the next year".

Says the IPKat, have a lovely weekend!

Friday flappings

Over sixty forthcoming events are currently listed in the IPKat's sidebar. Check them out: one (or more) might be just what you're looking for!


ActionAid UK has demonstrated that even the most serious of charities can have a sense of humour. The IPKat's friend Rebecca Dimaridis has pointed out that it has applied to patent a pre-salted potato chip as a means of demonstrating how absurd the patent rules are and how big business abuses them. Nice idea, but the Kat believes ActionAid will soon discover how wise those absurd rules are when its application is rightly refused for lack of novelty and want of an inventive step. Merpel says, has anyone seen the application? I'd love to take a look at the claims.


Around the blogs. 19 months after its launch as a niche blog for the interface of IP rights and monetary issues, IP Finance has now notched up its 600th email subscriber. Don't forget, the blog has organised a ground-breaking seminar on UNCITRAL's controversial proposals for dealing with security interests in IP rights: this seminar, which already has an enrolment of over 60 people, is free and carries 2.45 CPD points (details here). European trade mark blog Class 46 has now migrated to its new home on the MARQUES website, but a lot of readers are emailing Jeremy to ask where it is ... Baby blog Class 99, on design law in Europe and occasionally beyond, is now up to its 50th subscriber. A new blog for those poor souls suffering from patentexamitis is EQE Tools, established by J. Terpsma. For those who enjoy the suffering of others as well as their own, this blog offers dramatic openings to posts that go like this: "Question 8 of D1 2009 was one of few questions where I lost about half of the marks available ...".

If you want to ensure that the IPKat reads everything you write, why not apply for this position as Speech Writer for the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization? The deadline for applications is 14 October. Ability to write in a gentle Australian accent is not mandatory ...