OFFICE CLOSURE; IJLIT AGAIN

1 Intellectual property closes IP Office

The IPKat learns from the Antigua Sun that the Antigua & Barbuda Intellectual Property Rights and Commerce Office will be closed on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week to enable staff to attend an important workshop and seminar on “The enforcement of intellectual property; copyright and related rights”. During this period all “time sensitive” and important documents should be deposited at the Registry of the High Court at the Government Office Complex, Factory Road. The Registrar and Staff of the Antigua & Barbuda Intellectual Property Rights and Commerce Office, (ABPCO) apologise for any inconvenience this temporary closure may cause.

The IPKat is always glad to learn of the devotion of IP Office staff to learning more about his favourite subject, but this is the first time he's heard of an entire office being shut down because of it. Merpel asks, why does the IP Office need to learn about enforcement of rights? Isn't their business to grant them, not enforce them?


2 IJLIT again

Issue 3 of Oxford University Press's International Journal of Law and Information Technology has now been published. It is unusually IP-rich in its content, which includes

* "Crown Copyright in the UK - Is the Debate Still Alive?", by Stephen Saxby (Reader in IT Law, University of Southampton). for the benefit of non-UK readers, crown copyright is an anomalous provision, which has no justification in the Berne Convention, that vests copyright in a large number of public-commissioned works in the Government for a term that bears no reference to the life of the author(s);

* Jinseok Park (Korean Intellectual Property Office) asks "Has Patentable Subject Matter Been Expanded: a Comparative Study on Software Patent Practices in the European Patent Office, the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the Japanese Patent Office". If you think the title's long, the article weighs in at 42 pages.
* Assafa Endeshaw (Reader in Information Studies, University of Wolverhampton, left) writes "Intellectual Property Enforcement in Asia: a Reality Check";

* "Does P2P have a Future? Perspectives from Singapore" by Cheng Lim Saw and Winston T. H. Koh (both of the Singapore Management University";

* Aashish Srivastava analyses China's Electronic Signatures Law in the charmingly and ambiguously entitled "No Rice, No Wife to Cook".