Search results for

The Australian courts and the Australian Patent Office continue to have divergent views on the level of obviousness required to invalidate a patent. Whilst the Patent Office has attempted to move Australia towards the European so-called "problem and solution" approach, the courts highlight deficiencies in it and refuse to adopt the Office's preferred view.

In many countries IP, law affords separate protection to functional and non-functional aspects of a newly developed product. While novelty in function (a new invention) is covered by patent law, newness in aesthetics and other superficial features are protected by design law. However, in Thailand, IP protection for functional and design aspects is not mutually exclusive. Both inventions and designs are protected under the same patent law (Patent Act BE 2522(1979)). Consequently, many companies have ended up applying for design protection even when product changes are purely functional in nature and hence more applicable to invention patents than design patents. Sometimes these cases are driven primarily by concerns relating to cost, time (to bypass the substantive examination of an invention patent) or just plain strategy to monopolise a particular design.

The Director General of the Intellectual Property Office (IPOPHL), Ricardo Blancaflor, drawing on his experiences as former undersecretary of the Department of National Defense, and the Department of Justice where he handled activities involving anti-terrorism, anti-human trafficking, and the task force against political violence, has come out with some novel and less costly ways of assisting trade mark owners to enforce their IP rights in addition to raids, filing actions and border control measures. One of these is obtaining the cooperation of malls or shopping centres where the selling of counterfeits proliferates.

In case T1544/07 one of the opponents filed an appeal against the decision of the EPO Opposition Division to maintain the opposed patent in amended form. This would normally be a situation where the prohibition of reformatio in peius applies. But in this case, the Board of Appeal decided otherwise.

New Decree 119/2010/ND-CP (Decree 119) on amendment of some articles of Decree 105/2006/ND-CP (Decree 105) on protection of IP rights in Vietnam was promulgated by the Vietnam Government on December 30 2010, and becomes effective as of February 20 2011. Decree 105 is one of the most important legal instruments on protection and enforcement of IP rights in Vietnam.

Article 39.3 of TRIPs establishes that test data required as a condition to approve the marketing of pharmaceutical or agricultural chemical products which use new chemical entities, the origination of which involves a considerable effort, shall be protected against unfair commercial use.

Plans to develop a unitary patent system for the European Union have been thwarted by linguistic and legal difficulties. The main objectives of the unitary system are reduction of costs for obtaining and enforcing patents and lifting of legal uncertainties, by creating a unitary patent and a European Patents Court under a Unified Patent Litigation System (UPLS). Currently, European patents have to be validated in each country and are enforced by national law. The high translation costs for validating patents as well as the expensive and often unpredictable litigation outcome in the different member states – sometimes reaching conflicting verdicts in identical cases – have often been cited as major weak points of the system.

J Kitty Huang presents the results of a survey into attitudes to IP management among Taiwanese companies

On the basis of its Red Bull – and Bull – marks for alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and Class 3 goods like perfumes, the firm behind Red Bull has requested cancellation of the word mark Pitbull and the device showing in the centre the head of a pit-bull terrier with the word Pitbull above it and below the words "get the power". These marks were registered for identical goods, so there was no controversy about this point.

On November 25 2010, the National Copyright Bureau of China (NCB) promulgated the Measures for Registration of Copyright Pledge, replacing the Measures for Registration of Copyright Pledge Contract of September 23 1996. The new measures came into effect on January 1 2011.