Paper Name: Monday miscellany

The IPKat thanks his fashionable friend Mary-Ellen Field for letting him know what's afoot -- particularly if the foot concerned is boasting Louboutin red soles. Mary-Ellen found him this link to an article in The Independent that reports the scandalous practice of purchasing your own pot of scarlet paint and making your own Louboutins, as it were. Actually, it's more than just news report, it's an essay by Philippa Stockley on the social, political, religious and sexual connotations of red clothing, in footwear and indeed everywhere . Merpel's not scandalised: she thinks that there's a great market opportunity for Loutoutin here to try a little brand extension and market its own glossy red paint -- it would be bound to fetch a premium price over Homebase or Walmart products ...

Around the weblogs. The IPKat's previous round-up made a great deal of the plethora of Canadian copyright bloggers, all beavering away to bring us a greater understanding of that vast, largely uninhabited country's attitude to the vast, largely uncomprehended topic of fair dealing with works in which other people own the copyright. This survey failed to refer to Andrei Mincov's blog: Andrei too has opined on the five recent Supreme Court cases on Fair Dealing Thursday, pronouncing it "a very sad day for copyright and freedom in Canada". You can reading Andrei's piece here. His logo, being a representation of a sort of moth, appears on the left. "Copyright and Innovation -- the Untold Story" is the title of Michael Carrier's latest article, of which the abstract -- together with a little comment -- appears on the 1709 Blog here. If you're wondering what Kingsley Egbuonu is doing after completing his A to Z tour of African official IP websites for Afro-IP, you can find out right here.

Towards the end of last month, the British Brands Group (BBG) launched a major study into consumers and packaging which, while he was juggling with lots of other issues, this Kat managed to let fall completely from his line of vision. As the BBG explains, "the study is in three parts and is wide ranging". The three are as follows:

“Packaging in a market economy”, Research by Norwich Business School into the consumer, competition and economic importance of packaging.
“The effect of branding on consumer choice”, Original consumer research from Mountainview Learning on how branding helps shoppers notice and recognise products, and the disruption caused when brand size is reduced or products are similarly packaged.

“Confusion, heuristics and the consumer”, a study from law firm Speechly Bircham on how consumers use heuristics in their decision making, how the effect of heuristics may be measured and how judges may use behavioural science to identify and quantify, predictably and reliably, whether shoppers are confused by products that mimic the packaging of familiar brands [Merpel says, if you have ever fancied getting grown-up words like 'heuristics' into your cocktail reception chat, this is the one for you!].

If you're too busy to read the lot, or think you know it already but just want to be sure, there's a helpful summary of all three here -- "Unwrapped".

But if it's on Facebook, surely copyright doesn't apply any more? Professional photographer Paul Tansley has been giving some thought to copyright recently, in the light of what clearly appears to be a lamentable degree of ignorance and misunderstanding that attends any mention of the word "copyright" in some quarters. He writes to the IPKat as follows:

"I wrote a post on Facebook recently about Facebook and the copyright issue of images posted on it [which you can read in full on Paul's Facebook page here]. A week or so earlier, I'd posted up some images and some friends (and one acquaintance) used the images as their profile pics or cover pics. I pointed out to them that they had no right to do, since I -- and not they -- owned the copyright as the photographer. They could of course ask me to allow them to use them. Which of course I did.

This then brought up a few people saying that Facebook owns the copyright of all images posted to it. From my quick look around a few sites, this is not the case. You issue them with a royalty-free licence, so that they can legally display the images. But at no point do you hand them copyright. And the licence, although transferable by Facebook if they so chose, has not actually been transferred to the end user".

Thanks Paul, for your observation. The IPKat concedes that the internet makes things tougher for photographers than for many other 'creatives' since, unlike the music industry, the visual arts have fewer possible business models with which to experiment and their work, once separated from their name, circulates easily and is hard to keep track of.