Intellectual property masters

Law graduates: put your intellectual ability to good use by doing a masters in intellectual property.

According to the IPKat blog (a feline fund of matters patent, copyright, trade mark and design) a postgrad course is in preparation by Mark Anderson, solicitor and Managing Partner of Anderson Law LLP, who is:

"very keen to develop a Masters (LLM) programme, which could provide an attractive alternative to the Intellectual Property Diploma course, now hosted at Oxford. The Oxford course is very popular -- but it is heavily focused on IP litigation, whereas Mark would like to see a course, whether an entire LLM programme or just a module of an existing programme, for IP transactions."

A syllabus has now been produced, which you can download here, and on which Mark would like feedback, preferably before Friday, 19 August 2011, before taking matters further. (You can respond via IPKat's blog or direct to Mark on his website.)

IPKat's comment was that more concentration on transactional skills for IP lawyers certainly would not go amiss.

There are, of course, other IP law courses on offer. For example, Nottingham Trent University has been running a Post Graduate Diploma in Commercial IP each year since 2004, which can be converted to a full masters degree. Or if you fancy studying overseas, Santa Clara University School of Law in sunny California has a number of IP courses at LLM level and above (albeit with a US focus).

IP law is certainly a growth area, judging by the enormous numbers of judgments produced by the General Court of the Court of Justice of the European Union (phew!) otherwise known as "EGC"), of which a good many originate in the various Boards of Appeal of the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (Trade Marks and Designs) (OHIM) (phew again!) otherwise known as "OHIM".

The ICLR's European Court reporters can barely catch their breath before each new onslaught of judgments comes their way. Time consuming as it is, we pick through them all and select the ones with points of law of general interest, especially for readers of the Business Law Reports. Bear this in mind if you do take up the idea of a masters in IP law: the ICLR is your primary source of primary case law.

Tips on reading WLR Dailies on i-Pad and i-Phone

It's easy to access and read our WLR Daily case summaries on your i-Phone or i-Pad, despite the limitations of the touch-screen version of the Safari web browser. But it's not as straightforward as it might be, so here's a step-by-step guide.

1. Open the ICLR home page at www.iclr.co.uk

2. Go to Case Search on the upper grey toolbar

3. Select Case Summaries on the lower grey toolbar which will then appear

4. You can either enter the case name or other details, or simply click on This Week, This Month etc, followed by Search Now, to get a list of recent WLR Ds.

5. From the Results display generated by your search, press and hold your finger on the highlighted publication reference. A dialogue box should pop up, giving you the choice of "Open", "Open in New Page" or "Copy".

6. Select "Open in New Page" and the entire report should display in a new browser page.

7. You can also select "Copy" which copies the individual url for the report and can be pasted into the browser address box or into an email, text message, blog or tweet.

NB. The critical point to remember is not to attempt to open the case from the Home Page listing or from the left hand navigation page listing on other pages of the site. Only ever open it, using the "Open in New Page" procedure, from the Results listing.

The above procedure avoids the problem caused by the browser's failure to display individual scrollable frames within web pages (which is how the WLR Daily content is normally displayed on PC and laptop browsers).

For more tips on using the ICLR's free Case Search facility, see my earlier posting here.