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The Copyright Amendment Act, 2012, which came into force on June 21 2012, introduced major changes in the Indian Copyright Law. Various production houses and music labels have challenged the constitutional validity of these amendments before the Delhi High Court, by different petitions.

Even a quick look at the figure indicates that damage awards in Japanese patent infringement litigations could multiply because of a recent IP High Court decision.

Beginning March 1 2012, copyright owners would have the opportunity to notify the Controller of Copyright of their copyrighted works. Pursuant to the newly added section 26A of the Copyright Act 1987, a copyright owner in any copyrightable work, an assignee, licensee or person having been granted interest in the copyright or the author of the work himself or the author's representative who elects to notify the Controller under this "voluntary notification" scheme are required to provide the name, address and nationality of the copyright owner; a statutory declaration as to the position of the applicant for copyright notification; the category of the work; the title of the work; the name of the author and if the author is dead; the date of the author's death (if known); the date and place of the first publication (in the case of a published work) and any other information as the Minister may determine.

On February 8 2013, gym members in Auckland, New Zealand were given a physical jolt when three Club Physical gyms completely rebranded to Jolt Fitness. The rebranding resulted from a falling out between Stuart Holder, who was the sole director of Colven Botany, Three Kings and Westgate (collectively the franchisee), and Health Club Brands (the franchisor).

On April 3 2013, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) issued Office Order No 13-054 series of 2013 amending Section 20 of Office Order No 139 s 2012 relating to the Philippines regulations implementing the Madrid Protocol with regard to the submission of the Declaration of Actual Use (DAU).

One of the biggest threats to a brand owner is genericide, whereby widespread usage of a mark in the marketplace causes the term to be considered by the public to be a generic term for a particular product rather than a source identifier. Some well-known examples of marks which became generic over time in certain jurisdictions are "aspirin" and "escalator". When genericide occurs, a mark can no longer function as a trade mark, as it ceases to identify a particular source or to distinguish the origin of the product from competing products. Once a mark has become generic, the law deems it available for all parties to use and the now-former brand owner no longer has exclusive rights to it.

With the arrival of over 1,400 new generic Top Level Domain names (gTLDs), such as .energy and .legal, a system had to be developed to provide trade mark owners worldwide with the opportunity to register their trade mark under one or more new gTLDs as a domain name prior to the general public (during a so-called sunrise period). This system should indeed prevent cybersquatting, whereby a domain name is registered and/or used in bad faith to profit from a trade mark owner. To this end, ICANN appointed Deloitte and IBM who created the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH), which opened on March 26 2013.

The number of internet users in Croatia in 2010 was 2,244,400 or 50% of the population according to the ITU. That perecentage grew from 32.9% in 2006. As of June 30 2012 there were 2,656,089 internet users in Croatia, 59.2% of the population.

The UK has recently introduced new rules to allow expert witnesses to give evidence concurrently. David Wilson, Christopher Sharp, Sue Gilchrist and Nina Fitzgerald examine whether hot-tubbing has been successful in Australia and what lessons can be learned

At every INTA?Annual Meeting, Managing IP?staff ask attendees a single question every day. Here are the responses from two of them