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KSNH Observatory Overview

ObservatoryUnlike the situation in earlier decades when patents and trade marks were quite static fields of law, now these areas are much more dynamic. A lot of activities are currently pending in the field of patent law, eg. the plan to create a European Patent with unitary effect on the basis of an enhanced co-operation involving only a subset of all EU Member States. The EU trade mark law faces an overhaul within coming years. As the ACTA negotiations are now closed, the discussion about bringing the Agreement into force as well as about IP enforcement in general will get more heated. Businesses as well as interested circles of the public in general ought to be in the know of what is going on.

About a decade ago, when paper-based dissemination of information still was dominant, on-line collecting of and disseminating news on IP politics was the order of the day. As a result, at the beginning of this centiry blogging was invented as a new sub-branch of on-line media, and a number of IP folks started publishing their own blog.

As of today, in the second decade if the 21st century, the situation has substantially changed; the combination of many quality blogs continously reporting on a wide variety of IP topics together with experts using Twitter, Facebook and other social networks on the internet to broadcast bits of news with little or almost delay has rendered news as such into a commodity. Facing this situation we feel it might be useful to provide some sort of custodianship.

Some of the patent attorneys of the KSNH Patentanwälte law firm in Munich, Germany, have joined their efforts to research what is going on in the various branches of IP law in order to keep themselves, their clients as well as interested circles of the public up-to-date. To this end, the KSNH IP Observatory was created as a common custodianship platform to select, collect, aggregate and disseminate knowledge on current IP affairs utilising various useful means of today's social software serrvices including Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Xing, and others.

For now, two different blogs have been created as main tools under the roof of the KSNH IP Observatory:

Both blogs are run by a KSNH blogger team which, at the time being, comprises Volker Metzler and Axel H Horns.

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(Photo: (C) 2010 by Amanda Slater via Flickr and licensed under the terms of a CC license)