A summer message

Home, sweet home for JIPLP

At this week's JIPLP team meeting in Oxford, I was delighted to discover that the journal is maintaining its upward movement in market conditions which continue to vex most publishers, and indeed most journals. So far this year JIPLP has seen a more than gratifying 6% increase in its institutional subscriber base; production targets continue to be met; reader and contributor satisfaction levels run high and the pipeline continues to flow with high-quality articles and current intelligence notes.  

But JIPLP is meant to be more than just a journal.  Parallel to its formal website, leading to its archives and information for contributors, subscribers and readers, the jiplp weblog reaches out to a large and growing segment of the IP community, with over 800 subscribers and nearly half a million page views to date. To this we have added a Twitter account, which now has over 340 followers. Through this we have publicised articles and blogposts, sought authors on specialised topics and -- perhaps most entertainingly for those who are not authors -- pinpointed egregious errors and bad writing style in the pieces submitted to us.

The JIPLP community continues to seek new ways of making friends, reaching readers and sharing ideas.  Earlier this year we held two highly successful joint events with our German partners at GRUR Int and, for January 2014, we are plotting a London seminar in which we contrast the common law of passing off with the civil law concept of unfair competition, to examine how each works in practice and see what each body of law can learn from the other.  Details will be circulated once available.

In the meantime, we thank our readers, authors and critics for their various contributions to our venture and hope that, your continued input and support, we will be able to bring a better understanding of IP law and practice to the community we serve.