IMPACT®

Amazon's 1-click patent

A good snappy article on IPKat today about Amazon's lack of progress with its 1-click patent in Europe.

(By the way, is IPKat getting a little too keen on pictures of cats I wonder?)

Turn baby turn

Who would have thought that the humble twist drill bit, would have room for improvement?

Well, earlier this month a patent application by Nottingham-based Dormer Tools (Sheffield) Limited was published.

The patent application says:

"A vast number of twist drill designs are known and the geometry of the cutting tip is tailored for specific work pieces. For example, twist drills for wood have a different geometry to those used for metal work pieces. It is recognised that even small changes in geometry can significantly affect performance."

And this is the nub of the application: it is for drill bits for use with metal and composites and the patent claims that:

"The metal-working twist drill produces bores having a reduced exit burr height"

This is a great illustration of how the human mind can still find improvements in something that you might think didn't have much room for improvement left. In fact, a search within the patent class for drill bits shows that since the beginning of 2005 WIPO has published about 25 patent applications relating to drill bits.

Page rank junkies - you're wasting your time!

The quest to get to the top of the Google and MSN results is something that obsesses many businesses with an online presence. How to achieve that is what's called "search engine optimisation".

It's a subject that our clients sometimes ask about, and some have had interesting ideas about what can get a website to the top of the search results. Susan Hallam's blog today discusses some of the myths of search engine optimisation. Well worth a read if you're currently working on your organisation's website.

INTA RSS feeds

If you are a trade mark professional or a business with substantial trade mark interests, chances are that you are member of the International Trade Mark Association.

You might have spotted that deep within the INTA site you can subscribe to RSS feeds. I've been subscribing for several months. However, they are consistently so full of HTML formatting codes that they are unreadable in practice. It may be down to me and my GreatNews RSS newsreader, but this is the only feed that comes out in this format so suspect it's not me.

Back in November 2006, I wrote to INTA's publicity team the following:

"I'm an INTA member and subscribe to the INTA RSS feeds. Unfortunately, the formatting of these doesn't really work (I attach a print-out of the feed from my RSS Reader). Given that RSS feeds are likely to become increasingly important, I think the Association ought to be looking at getting this right."

I've not heard from them and the feeds are still rubbish. I'm going to press them again.

FOIA in tendering to the public sector

We have lots of clients that pitch for and win business from the public sector and it constantly surprises me that they do not consider the issues around Freedom of Information sufficiently. To illustrate how you can use the FOIA and find out how you can find out who else bid for a job and who won it, take a look at the recently published request to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport about facilities management contracts worth over £500k.

Latest OHIM newsletter

OHIM has today published its latest newsletter. Contents include:

• The FAZER trade mark case (pdf link)
• A country overview for Ireland in terms of its CTM and RCD filings
• A commentary on the Proctor & Gamble case against Reckitt Benckiser about the same of the can for spray containers.

Government's FOIA plans flawed

If you are interested in FOIA matters, then reading Heather Brooke's Your Right to Know blog is a good idea. She's got an interesting piece today about the proposals to change the charging mechanisms for the Freedom on Information Act 2000.

Reasonable -v- Best endeavours

Out-law.com has a good article today about the Rhodia International Holdings Limited & Rhodia Uk Limited -V- Huntsman International LLC case, in which the Court provided helpful guidance about the differences between best endeavours and reasonable endeavours.

Widget for our site

There was a day when we used "widget" as a generic for, well, almost anything. How language moves on.

For many people, the "widget" is the thing in a can of beer that gives it a proper head when you pour it out into your glass (see the 1969 patent application by Guinness or the 1989 patent application by Ernest James Price and the trade marks WIDGETPLUS SYSTEM and WORTHINGTON CREAMFLOW BITTER CREAMFLOW WIDGET owned by Coors. There's also a good write-up generally in Wikipedia).

However, widget is increasingly popular in web terminology. Again, Wikipedia has a good entry for Web Widget. Not surprisingly, the "verbalisation" of nouns means that you can now "widgetize" things and you might notice on our blog we've got a new button on the top left that lets you get our blog feed by means of a widget you can embed in your own site or blog. Blog + widget = blidget, it seems. Of course, whether anyone uses it is a different story!

Joost doing by the book

John Naughton's blog, Memex 1.1, picked up a story in the New York Times about Joost.

Basically, it is about the two people who were behind Kazaa and Skype. The story talks about how they created new products that took the market place forward and to some extent, pushed the legal boundaries and involved them, in the case of Kazaa, in legal disputes.

It seems that they have set their new venture up with the legals sorted at the outset. According to the paper:

“The reason we’re doing this is because of our history,” Mr. Friis said in a telephone interview last week. “We know how these things work. And above all, we know that we don’t want to be in a long, multiyear litigation battle.”

This something we see in practice time and time again. New ventures do not even consider looking at legal issues unless they really have to, such as when sorting out office premises. Issues like checking to make sure you don't step on other people's legal toes are easy, and expensive, steps that any new business venture is generally happy to skip. However, the downside is that if you do find yourself on the receiving end of litigation it can be even more expensive, even more costly and might jeopardise your whole venture.

The lesson is simple and summed up Mr Friis neatly.

In my words, prevention is better than cure, especially if the cure fixes it for the other party and not you!

One of the great things about intellectual property is that so much of it is searchable and you can, with relative ease, avoid getting yourself into a problem.