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On April 7 2006, Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code were cleared of infringing copyright in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (HBHG). The case was brought by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of HBHG, against Random House (the publisher of both books).

The legal provisions regarding actions to cancel a trade mark are contained in Article 48 of Law 84/1998 concerning trade marks and geographical indications, specifying that "any interested person" can request a trade mark cancellation if:

Attention is increasingly focusing on the enforcement of Community trade marks. Verena von Bomhard, Burkhart Goebel and Ana Castedo of Lovells examine enforcement in the new Spanish CTM courts in Alicante and find that, despite their heavy workload, they have proven efficient and quick, producing reasonable decisions in a highly complex legal environment

Emma Barraclough, Hong Kong

IACC Conference, Toronto, Canada, May 3–5.

As a general rule in the UAE, there is no synchronization between the Economic Department and/or the Municipalities (which regulate the grant of trade licences and approval of trade names in the different Emirates) and the Trade Mark Registry in terms of clearing the trade names against the Trade Marks Registry's database prior to granting approvals. As a result, trade marks often compete with company names as identifiers of the origin of goods and services. A common belief is that these signs confirm similar rights to the owner or registrant.

The growth in applications has raised more questions about the qualification requirements for patent attorneys in Turkey. Only patent attorneys are statutorily allowed to represent foreign applicants with regard to patents before the Turkish Patent Institute (TPI).

On March 1 2006, US pharmaceutical company Pfizer sued the Philippine International Trading Corp (PITC) and the Bureau of Food And Drugs (BFAD) before the Regional Trial Court of Makati Branch 61. It accused them of infringing its patent for its anti-hypertension drug Norvasc (which has the generic name amlodipine besylate), after the PITC imported some samples of a similar drug sold by Pfizer in India (under the brand name Amlogard) and submitted the samples to the BFAD for testing and product registration. Pfizer's Philippine patent expires in June 2007. The PITC filed a Ps1.5 million ($30,000) countersuit against Pfizer, claiming that the US company was attempting to stop the government from importing cheap medicine.

Licence agreements in Malaysia are generally governed by the Malaysian Trade Marks Act 1976 and the Contracts Act 1950. Nevertheless, the term "licence" is not expressed in the Trade Marks Act 1976. Instead the licensee is referred to as a "registered user".

Eight out of ten licensors do not perform royalty examinations of their licensees, yet research suggests that in 90% of cases royalties are misreported. Melanie Butler examines what is going wrong and provides some pointers for licensors