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The EPC 2000 (in force since December 13 2007) introduced the possibility to review decisions made by the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office. A party that is adversely affected by a decision of a Board can file a petition for review if fundamental procedural violations happened during the appeal proceedings.

Seven jurisdictions have applied to launch non-Latin country-code top-level domains. Fionn O'Raghallaigh explains

Europe's highest court has been asked to rule on whether fake goods in transit through the EU can be seized by Customs, report James Nurton and Emma Barraclough

China's government has released draft rules on national standards. Peter Ollier reports

Eileen McDermott reports from Washington DC on the oral arguments in the Bilski case

We are about to embark on major litigation. However, we want to ensure the costs are kept under control. What measures can we take?

When two parties own and use arguably similar marks, they are often able to address their respective concerns regarding the other's use and resolve any differences between them amicably by entering into what is commonly referred to as a Co-Existence Agreement. A Co-Existence Agreement typically operates to either provide consent from a senior user of a mark to a junior user's use of a similar mark and/or to resolve a dispute regarding competing uses of a mark when an adversarial proceeding is pending.

A little known provision of US law, 28 USC § 1782, allows for the use of US discovery proceedings to secure evidence for use in foreign judicial or administrative proceedings. This has been employed successfully to assist in patent infringement proceedings outside of the US, and may even be used in patent opposition proceedings outside of the US.

Few problems on the Russian IP landscape stir public opinion more than parallel imports, which have been the talk of the day for almost two years, playing the same tune for months. First, it was the administrative prosecution that stumbled in every other case until the Supreme Arbitration Court said that administrative prosecution of parallel imports was not possible. For the sake of order it should be acknowledged that the Code on Administrative Offences has clumsy wording in the section dedicated to trade mark infringement. This allowed parallel importers to evade responsibility – not always but sometimes. To offset the chagrin of the trade mark owners, the Supreme Arbitration Court also said that the civil law had enough tools to protect trade mark rights against infringement.

As a non-EU member state, Norway is not bound by the provisions of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of April 29 2004 on the enforcement of IP rights.