Monday miscellany

Forthcoming events. The IPKat reminds readers that there's always plenty of choice when it comes to conferences, seminars, lectures and courses that might grab a person's fancy. In the past week the Kat's list has grown by nearly 30 items (mostly from FORUM Institut, which runs events all over Europe, it seems): do check them out!

No Twit. Managing Intellectual Property magazine has arranged a Twitter Q &A with  legendary Fordham IP impresario and larger-than-life personality Hugh Hansen this Wednesday, 25 March and, as editor James Nurton says with typical British understatement, "It should be interesting".   – we’d be grateful if you can encourage/alert people to take part. Details can be ascertained by clicking here.  The protocol is simple enough: Managing IP will ask some questions through its Twitter account @managingip using the hashtag #askhughhansen. If all goes well, Hugh Hansen (@hughchansen) will answer. All IP-enthusiastic Twitter users are also invited to participate. The Twitterthon runs from 11 am EDT (3 pm London, 4 pm continental Europe), and the best exchanges of tweets will be published -- so you'd better be careful what you say.

IP Mediation Open Day.  Both Class 46 and Class 99 unashamedly publicise the IP Mediation Open Day on 15 June, run by the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) in its Alicante headquarters. This Kat still has the fondest memories of last May's IP Mediation Conference, from which he concluded that this dispute resolution process has much to commend it, and that OHIM's own IP mediation service is too hedged in by conditions to be as useful as it might be. If you want a day's useful instruction in the dark art of IP mediation, or are just looking for a good source of vitamin D, Alicante is the place to go.

Is it news? Is it fair ...?

Around the weblogs.  The 1709 Blog again provides much of the action, with Marie-Andrée Weiss updating us on the latest developments in what looks as though it might end up as a seminal fair use ruling in the US in the Fox News 9/11 photos case, while Ben Challis's CopyKat post revisits the Blurred Lines dispute -- which looks as though it will have the warring factions drawing up Battle Lines soon. SOLO IP's Barbara Cookson breaks the monotony of having nothing much to blog about by reviewing what looks like a genuinely useful book on proceedings before the European Patent Office while, on Scrivener's Error, C.E. Petit, pausing to reflect again on Blurred Lines, is becoming provocative: "My basic thesis is that intellectual property law has become a law devoted almost solely to transferee rights, and not to either actual creations or actual creators" [Hmm. I knew that already, sniffs Merpel].


Beer brand borrowed.  "Central City Brewing beer label in copyright conflict" is the title of this piece in CBC News, spotted last week by Steven Preece (Katpat!). The brewery got itself into a spot of trouble when a new cartoon label for its Detective Saison brew ("the first character-based beer to be introduced, amidst the dirt and weeds sullying the streets of Central City", here) turned out to have been borrowed from the comic book series, Powers. Once this was spotted, some 24,000 bottles needed to be relabelled. Oh dear ...