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On July 1 2009, the Rule on Mandatory Legal Aid Service, which was issued by the Philippine Supreme Court on February 10 this year, takes effect. This Rule mandates practising lawyers to render free legal aid services equivalent to a minimum of 60 hours a year, in all cases whether civil, criminal and administrative involving indigent and pauper litigants needing lawyers. The purpose of the Rule is to improve access to justice by the less privileged thereby enhancing the duty of lawyers to society as agents of social change, and to the courts.

In a recent decision concerning the Amazon.com 1-click ordering system, the Patent Appeal Board re-examined the criteria for patentable subject matter in relation to business method patents. While finding the subject matter not obvious in accordance with the test adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada, the Board held that it failed to fall within the statutory definition of invention as qualified by judicial interpretation.

I've recently qualified as a lawyer. What can I do to maximise my chances of getting a good job in IP when the economy picks up?

For applications filed after July 1 2004, The Singapore Patent Act provides a number of options for an applicant to obtain grant at 42 months from priority date under a fast-track system or at 60 months from priority date under a slow-track system. A decision to switch from a default fast track to the slow track must be done by requesting a block extension before 39 months have elapsed from the priority date.

The boundary between activities that fall within the experimental exemption and activities that are instead reserved to the patentee has always been fluid. A particularly topical question concerns the activities linked to obtaining marketing approval for the generic version of a medicinal product that is covered by a patent.

The report of the Technical Expert Group on Patent Law Issues, led by RA Mashelkar, was resubmitted to the Union Ministry for Trade and Commerce in March 2009. It was first submitted in December 2006 and was withdrawn for review owing to some technical inaccuracies in the Report.

Within the next few months, the EPO's Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) is expected to rule that a fundamental violation of a party's right to be heard occurred in appeal proceedings concerning the opposition against EP 978251, Hoya Corp v Olympus Corp. A communication of the EBA dated May 18 2009 indicates that this will be the probable conclusion in petition for review case number R 7/09. Assuming that the EBA decides accordingly in its final ruling, R 7/09 will be the first ever case in which the EBA allows a petition for review and re-opens proceedings in a case after issuance of a last-instance decision in appeal.

IP concerns are increasingly likely to make or break cross-border M&A deals in China. In the second of a two-part series, Catherine Sun provides a step-by-step guide to getting it right

In a surprise arbitration decision, Nike has lost its complaint over five domain names registered by a Korean company.

Some of the world's biggest companies – including GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft – have teamed up with the USPTO and New York Law School to launch a new system of peer review for software patents.