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Remember, remember, it’s time for Movember
UPDATED with new MoBros
Well the clocks will soon be going back and the nights will begin to get longer. Christmas is just around the corner but first there’s the small matter of Movember.
For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Movember is an opportunity for men around the world to look like plonkers while raising money for charity. Essentially, we start clean shaven on 1 November and then attempt to grow a moustache across the course of the month, hopefully raising some money along the way. The money raised is in support of men’s health issues, particularly testicular cancer and prostate cancer. The Movember movement started in Australia in 2003 and there are now formal campaigns in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Ireland, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Czech Republic. Last year nearly £80 million was raised for these worthy charities.
Colour Me Blue
IPcopy welcomes guest contributor Annette Freeman:
Colour me red…or blue.
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom, for me and for you
And I think to myself – what a wonderful world.
So sang Louis Armstrong, going on to croon about “Skies of blue, clouds of white” and ‘“the colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky”. But when it comes to trade marks, colours may not be there “for me and you”. A high-profile trade mark legal battle recently illustrated the difficulties of protecting and enforcing colour as a trade mark.
GMO = patenting = evil ?
An interesting story by Charles Eisenstein in The Guardian highlights the way in which patents often become associated with potentially negative aspects of technology. It can sometimes seem as if the word “patent” when associated with a given technology acts as a flag to the reader that this is evil science.
Small Claims Track in PCC
On 1 October 2012 the Patents County Court (PCC) introduced a small claims track to run beside the PCC multi-track.
The small claims track will be suitable for claims up to a value of £5,000 and is expected to be of benefit to individuals and SMEs who previously may not have wanted to start claims in the PCC.
Cases in the PCC small claims track will be handled more informally than in the PCC multi-track. Suitable cases relating to trade marks or passing off, copyright and unregistered design right may be brought in the PCC small claims track. However, claims concerned with patents, registered designs (including Community registered designs) and plant varieties may not be brought in the PCC small claims track.
If you’d like to know more, speak to your friendly neighbourhood trade mark attorney
Is standardisation always a good thing in patents?
The EPO and USPTO have announced triumphantly that they have completed the Herculean task of creating a consolidated patent classification scheme that provides up to 250,000 individual definitions for areas of science and technology. This project has been the result of several years’ work to harmonise the previously divergent technical classification systems used in the US and Europe to assist patent examiners in prior art searching and examination of patent applications. In essence, every patent application filed is assessed by an examiner and allocated one or often several classifications that cover the technologies used in the invention. Until now different classification strategies were used by the US and Europe often resulting in divergence in the outcomes of patent prior art searching. The intention of the project, called the cooperative patent classification scheme (CPC), according to EPO President Benoit Battistelli, is to “…align our patent procedures more closely and deliver major efficiency gains”. The Director of the USPTO, David Kappos, is perhaps a little more pragmatic about the benefits stating the new scheme is needed to “…eliminate duplication of work between the two Offices”. In fact it represents another step towards global harmonisation of the patent system which would allow applicants to avoid the current process of prosecuting patent applications according to divergent standards in different countries. Surely from a cost perspective this has to be a good thing, right?
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