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James Nurton, London

Stéphanie Bodoni, London

A recent decision by the European Court of First Instance (CFI) has denied the Irish boy band Westlife registration of the Westlife name as a Community trade mark.

In a widely watched patent infringement case, main board-listed Trek 2000 International, an innovator and a patentee in Universal Serial Bus (USB) portable mass storage technology, recently achieved a significant victory in enforcing its patent against four defendants.

In an effort to reduce its backlog of cases, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPhil) is introducing summary procedures for inter partes cases and conducted a public hearing on May 21 2005 to encourage comments on its proposal from practitioners. Inter partes proceedings refer to cancellation of patents, registration of layout design, trade mark registration, trade mark opposition and petition for compulsory licensing.

On April 19 2005 the Senate approved a Decree amending some articles of the Law of Industrial Property (LIP) and introducing new articles, all of them concerning well-known trade marks.

India's Patent Office has published a draft Manual of Patent Practice & Procedure. The manual runs to 166 pages and contains 14 chapters and three annexes. In the introduction, the Controller of Patents says that the principal objective of the manual is to establish uniformity and homogeneity in the processing of patent applications in India. This is an indirect admission that there has been little uniformity and consistency in India's patent prosecution system so far, particularly in the examination system. In particular, there has been a considerable degree of subjectivity in the way that the structure and functions of claims have been dealt with, the most critical aspect of the patent prosecution system.

The Korean National Assembly passed a new bill on May 3 to amend certain provisions of the Korean Patent Act governing restoration of patent rights. This new bill allows patentees to restore their patents in cases where they lapsed because patent annuity fees were not paid. The new law will become effective on September 1 this year.

Europe is following the US example and introducing a Bolar provision to exempt generic research aimed at obtaining regulatory approval. Marjan Noor and Camilla Smith examine the proposal and how it is likely to be implemented by member states

India's courts have handed down a steady stream of IP-friendly decisions over the past year, from domain name and phishing cases to counterfeiting and copyright. Vaishali Mittal and Munish Mehra of Anand and Anand explain how the lawsuits have transformed India's IP litigation landscape