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All countries of the Gulf are civil law countries with the code typically exhaustively covering the complete system of the law. This being said, the first-to-file concept is given considerable weight. Despite the fact that some GCC countries may offer a limited amount of common law rights, enforcement is relative and solely determined by the practitioner handling the case.

If an allegedly patent infringing product does not literally use a certain feature of a patent claim, but uses a surrogate means, according to German Patent Law, the product can still be sued for infringement under the doctrine of equivalence.

In a case regarding parallel imports of spare parts for motorcycles/vehicles, the Athens Single Member Court of First Instance, by its recent judgment number 6570/2013, affirmed the principle of Community exhaustion of trade mark rights by making extensive reference to the CJEU's settled case law C-78/70 Deutsche Grammophn, C-16/74 Centrafarm BV v Winthorp BV, landmark case C-355/96 Silhouette and recent C-449/09 Kabushiki Kaisha v IPN Bulgaria.

In a manufacturer-distributor relationship, does the distributor have trade mark rights? The question was answered by the Court of Appeal in La Pointique International Ltd v Soo Juan Choon & Co, Civil Appeal W-02-3706-10.

On March 15 1989, the Department of Health (DOH) issued Administrative Order Number 67 series of 1989 entitled Revised Rules and Regulations on Registration of Pharmaceutical Products. This required drug manufacturers to register certain drug and medicine products with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before release to the public, and to submit satisfactory bioavailability/bioequivalence (BA/BE) test results to secure a certificate of product registration (CPR). This requirement, however, was put on hold because there was no local facility capable of conducting the test. In 1997, the FDA issued Circulars Numbers 1 and 8 resuming the implementation of the requirement for the BA/BE testing.

Ruth Burstall and Iona Silverman review two design cases that cast some light on issues such as the scope of protection and the overall impression on the informed user, but argue that many questions remain unanswered

In light of the UK government’s recent announcement that it intends to introduce regulations to provide for plain packaging, Katharine Stephens, Toby Bond, Manon Rieger-Jansen and Graham Maher take stock of the policy’s impact in Australia and the legal challenges it has faced

Last year, in the Schütz v Werit case, the UK Supreme Court clarified when replacing a consumable part of a larger patented article constitutes patent infringement. Mark Marfé, Sabine Boos, Camille Pecnard, Riccardo Fruscalzo and Rik Zagers examine how the issue has been addressed in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and France

North America Awards 2014

With a population of some 165 million, Nigeria is far and away Africa's most populous country. It's also well on track to becoming Africa's biggest economy in terms of GDP. But how is its IP?