Purr

Jeremy Phillips's presentation to IPCEX and Liverpool Inventors Club this evening was excellent. The audience filled the magnificent board room of the Martin's Building, one of Herbert Rowse's masterpieces. It was a pretty good cross-section of Merseyside - lawyers, patent agents, inventors, festival directors - all sorts.

Removing his jacket, loosening his tie and taking off his shoes, Jeremy asked for a show of hands of lawyers, then a show of hands for business people, then a show of hands of creators of intellectual property. Save for one or two inventors everyone was quiet. Then we all put up our hands in spontaneous recognition that we are all intellectual property creators. Maybe not very valuable IP. But IP just the same.

The title of the talk was "Five Live Issues in Intellectual Property". These are 5 issues that currently interest Jeremy. They were "Comparative Advertising", "Enforcement", "Summary Judgment" (or throwing out the rubbish as Jeremy called it), "Action Replays" and "IP as Collateral". As I intend to upload copies of Jeremy's slides and notes for the website I shan't go into too much detail. All I will say is that he provoked a lot of thought by his some interesting slants. Some of these topics covered very wide areas. His discussion of O2 Ltd & Anr v. Hutchison 3G UK Ltd [2006] EWHC 534 (Ch) and Case C-228/03,The Gillette Company v. LA-Laboratories Ltd Oy [2005] EUECJ C-228/03 (17 March 2005) covered what we used to call "use in the trade mark sense" before Arsenal Football Club v Reed as much as comparative advertising but it was all good stuff.

As a bonus Jeremy listed some non-issues in IP. I can't remember all of them but they included software patents, olefactory trade marks, human rights/confidentiality interface and registered design/trade mark interface.

We had several good questions afterwards. Some were legal or technical but most came from the public. These raised more issues which we could have talked about all night. But there were a lot of people who wanted to meet Jeremy and Kirwans had laid on a spread. So I had to call a halt.

I am elated. This was the best IPCEX ever. Indeed it was the best IP event that I have ever attended in the North. Although Jeremy's presentation would have gone down well anywhere a special thank you should go to Kirwan's marketing manager, Marianne Tuck, who made the event special. Well done!

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