* This afternoon, 2.30pm (Tim Roberts, President, and Vicki Salmon, Chair, Litigation Committee, Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys; Henry Carr QC, Chair, Intellectual Property Bar Association); 3.30pm (Dr Christian Gassauer-Fleissner, Chairman of European Patents Lawyers Association -- EPLAW)
* Next Wednesday 1 February, 2.30pm (Baroness Wilcox, Parliamentary Secretary, and officials, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills).These sessions, which will be held in a Committee Room at the House of Commons, are open to the public. You should be able to watch them since they're being streamed by Parliament TV (which you can access here). The IPKat hopes that lots of people will be watching, though he has a slight misapprehension that, if more than three people try to watch it at the same time, the whole system will crash. Merpel adds: if the camera is panning the audience as well as the participants, viewers might get a glimpse of Annsley the AmeriKat, who is selflessly yielding any prospect of pleasure on this, her birthday afternoon, by attending this vitally serious session.
Recent publications. British Brands, the newsletter of the British Brands Group, has just released its most recent newsletter, which leads with a feature on the Dulux dog (left), a successful brand which is now in its 50th year. Maybe not a shaggy dog but definitely a bit hangdog these days is Welsh international soccer star and Manchester United stalwart Ryan Giggs (right), who graces the cover of the current issue of Informa's Intellectual Property Magazine: Giggsy's trial by social media. The cover story, by Lewis Silkin LLP's Jonathan Coad and Sadiq Tajbhai, compares social media treatment of named and shamed celebrities with the placing of miscreants in the village stocks, to have rotten cyber-fruit thrown at them.
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| Some live, unexploded haggis |
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| Civil service training is particularly rigorous for those engaged in IP policy. But the IPKat is still uncertain: is the Hooper the person who holds the hoop or the soul who jumps through it? |
Promotion, palace coup, digital exchange: renewed call for evidence. If you tweet "Esther Bernaldo de Quiros, Policy Adviser and Project Support, Digital Copyright Exchange Feasibility Study Secretariat", you will have used 119 of your 140 allotted characters. But never mind, Esther B de Q [not to be confused with B & Q, warns Merpel] is now a name for IP enthusiasts in the UK to conjure with. Having replaced Jo Sampson in the DCE secretariat [Is this a promotion? A palace coup? An Arsene Wenger substitution? A Digital Copyright Secretariat Exchange? Merpel demands to know] wants to introduce herself as the new contact for Richard Hooper, Ros Lynch and any DCE-related enquiries. More importantly , she wants to double check [how typical of civil servants to do everything twice!] that we have all received the call for Evidence that her office issued in December. All you need to know, if you want to submit evidence, can be gleaned by a quick visit here. If you're going to respond, Esther asks you to email your evidence with a completed response sheet to HooperSecretariat@ipo.gov.uk no later than Friday 10 February. If, like most ordinary mortals, you have no idea what the UK government deems to be "open and transparent evidence for policy", you will be relieved to discover that this mysterious concept is demystified here.