PHOSITA® | phosita ::: quick links for 3/16/2008

Yes, I am a couple of days late on this one… but I think it was a good way to start a new week: let’s talk about blimps. On March 14, 1899 – Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin received a U.S. patent for his rigid airship design. And no – he wasn’t a member of the rock band.

Well, the ongoing saga continues of the patent infringement action that Gibson Guitar filed against the Guitar Hero franchise. Add a little bit of obsession and a dose of paranoia, and you can come up with all kinds of theories.

No longer will we be idle, and watch as our community goes without representation in the United States of America.

For nearly a century, Standford University’s humor magazine – Chaparral – has published a fake edition of the Stanford Daily, the university’s newspaper, on the Monday of the week preceding winter quarter exams. This year’s effort was the first to include a Web site designed by a computer science major to accompany the main headline article about Stanford disclosing information on students who had been downloading music illegally. When students typed in their name at http://riaa.stanford.edu to see if they were likely to be contacted by the Recording Industry Association of America, a program told half the students they were in trouble. While randomly assigned, the response remained consistent regardless of how many times a student checked his name.

As a response to the growing demand from the business community for executive programs on Intellectual Property (IP) management, the WIPO Worldwide Academy and the Kellogg School of Management – a leading business school – have teamed up for the second year running to offer the 2008 executive program on “Strategies for Management of Intellectual Property”.

A press release by WIPO stated that this year’s program will be held at the Kellogg Campus in Chicago from June 9 to 12, 2008. The course will offer an opportunity to gain a practical understanding of the various strategies and approaches to enable effective development and optimization of a company’s intellectual property assets, to formulate effective IP-focused business strategies and to successfully negotiate IP licensing agreements with business partners.

The Indian government is likely to enact a law to create uniform legal framework for government-funded research and give universities and research institutions ownership and patent rights for their innovations.

A legal fight in the Netherlands – between Deutsche Telekom and Compello – over the use of the color magenta is pushing the boundaries of trademark law in the European Union.

“Brands are in a position of power, and they need to act maturely rather than immaturely,” said Paul Hughes, the creative director of Lava Graphic Design in Amsterdam, which last autumn organized the Free Magenta campaign that quickly spread through the blogosphere. “You’re limiting what others can do. You’re limiting the environment.”

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Posted by Douglas Sorocco, March 16, 2008 at 7:58 pm
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