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A monthly column devoted to IP curiosities and controversies, named in honour of John of Utynam - who received the world's first recorded patent in 1449

Austria PATENT PROSECUTION Tier 1 Sonn & Partner Tier 2 Beer & Partner Kopecky & Schwarz Tier 3 Patentanwalt Dr Thomas M Haffner Patentanwälte Puchberger, Berger & Partner Patentanwälte Schütz und Partner Torggler & Hofinger Tier 4 Barger, Piso & Partner Patentanwaltskanzlei Wildhack & Jellinek

Shahnaz Mahmud, New York

Plans to implement the European Patent Litigation Agreement - touted as the answer to Europe's patent dispute woes - are in trouble. Emma Barraclough looks at the cause of the impasse and asks what the European Commission will do next

Emma Barraclough, London

Companies spend a lot of money buying and selling usage rights to software and related services. As such, various types of software licensing agreements are becoming ever more important for both IT companies and their customers. Despite the fact that contract amounts are often relatively large in relation to the company's other finances and that the product to be delivered often has an activity-critical function for the customer, it is extremely common that licensing agreements and the associated documentation leave much to be desired with respect to legibility, appropriate adjustments and so forth. This is especially the case when the software licensing agreements are not entirely standardized in their form, much less business-specific.

On December 14 2006, the Court of First Instance (CFI) upheld that Community trade mark applications representing deer heads with the word "Venado" were confusingly similar to earlier trade marks consisting of a deer's head with a cross surrounded by a halo and the word "Jägermeister".

Manufacturers of medicinal products are legally obliged to obtain regulatory approval for their product before marketing of that product may begin. However, where different salts, esters, ethers, isomers, complexes or derivatives of a brand (on-patent) drug are made by a generic company, and these differ significantly in properties with regard to safety and/or efficacy when compared to the patented drug, additional clinical data demonstrating the safety and/or efficacy of that generic drug must be submitted by the generic company to the marketing authority.

Acacia Technologies: an aggressive patent troll that feeds off the litigation fears of large corporations, or the champion of small technology companies who might not know how to go about enforcing their patents? Shahnaz Mahmud weighs up the evidence

The GPL has become the most common open source licence since its release in 1989. But only recently has a body of case law begun to develop on whether it is enforceable. James Gatto argues that cases in the US and Germany suggest that it is