World IP Day: a global review
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Five years after WIPO launched its annual celebration of IP, World Intellectual Property Day, member states are competing to mark it in the most creative fashion.
In Hong Kong the IP department and Scout Association joined forces in the fun, games, singing performances and live music featured at the iRespect for Intellectual Property Rights Fun Fair on April 23, three days before the official day itself.
As part of its programme, Algeria commemorated the day with a special postage stamp, and in Belize the IP Office hosted a trade mark seminar and a lunch, and arranged for a TV advert on "Creative Belize" to be broadcast.
Hungary awarded the Millennium Prize of the Hungarian Patent Office to outstanding achievers in IP and showed works of art and films by László Moholy-Nagy commemorating the 60th anniversary of the artist's death. The day also included a presentation on the Hungarian Design Centre, which will open this May.
In Kyrgyzstan, activities included a roundtable on piracy problems; a "Stop Piracy!" event in which counterfeit audio-visual works were destroyed; a competition for the best poster on Intellectual Property Day; and, hard to beat, a chess tournament and tennis competition. Korean audiences had at least as much choice – with activities ranging from an awards ceremony and a concert with celebrity performances to a film presentation and an anti-piracy campaign, an essay-writing competition for students, and a cyber game competition, in which famous cyber games players performed popular games before an audience.
The Slovak Republic included an exhibition of children's drawings on the theme, "Children's View of Inventions" and even Trinidad and Tobago had a packed programme including radio and television broadcasts on IP issues, workshops, exhibitions and an essay competition.
World IP Day was launched by WIPO on April 26 2001 to encourage people to reflect on how IP affects their daily lives. The theme this year was "IP – It Starts with an Idea".
Alternative .eu rankings
EURid's official statistics tell you that, as of April 25, Germany led the list of countries with most applicants for .eu domains, followed at some distance by the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, France and – surprisingly – Cyprus.
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An alternative means of assessing the popularity of .eu is to look at what is for sale on eBay. As MIP went to press at the end of April, there were 53 .eu domains or domain packages listed on eBay.com, 49 on ebay.co.uk, 14 on ebay.nl, just one each on ebay.de and ebay.es and no nom de domaine at all on ebay.fr.
Most of the domains on offer are generic names that have been bought by speculators, such as advertising.eu (reserve price $1,000), savenow.eu and topups.eu. One package of 55 domain names based on generic terms is offered with a starting price of £100,000 ($180,000) or a Buy It Now price of £500,000.
Names resembling football clubs, such as rangersfc.eu, chelseatv.eu and arsenaltv.eu are on offer, as well as some pornographic titles.
Cybersquatters have also applied to register some company and brand names that are for sale (although the domains may be subject to validation and/or dispute proceedings). These include mowlem.eu, stellaartois.eu, skyyvodka.eu and hondacivic.eu.
However, the bidding does not provide much encouragement for cybersquatters. Most of the domains have no bids at all, and those that do are not likely to recoup the investment in registration costs. With one day to go, autoclaim.eu had the most bids with 10, the highest at $21.51. Three days before its auction ends, the highest bidder for ipodparts.eu had offered $4.25. Thebbc.eu had attracted one bid of $17.82 and the highest of five bids for beautycosmetics.eu was just $12.50.
Win Canadian gifts
MIP has a range of Canadian souvenirs available at its stand, number 423, at the INTA Annual Meeting exhibition in Toronto from May 8 to 10. To be entered into a draw to win them, come to the stand during the exhibition hours with the answer to the following question:
Which company won the in-house team of the year award at MIP's Awards Dinner on March 29?
All those with the correct answer will be entered into the draw to win the Canadian food, drink and other goodies.
The winners of copies of The Little Blues, MIP's newly published book on how to create a culture of IP in a small technology company, are:
Alex Turnbull, IP analyst, Cambridge Display Technology Limited, Cambridge, UK
Janal Kalis, Schwegman Lundberg Woessner & Kluth, Minneapolis, Minnesota, US
Congratulations to both. The answers to the questions were: Big Blue was directed by Luc Besson, Deep Blue was an IBM supercomputer that played chess and Blue Train is an album by John Coltrane.
