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The patent prosecution highway (PPH) is a programme in which the applicant enjoys an expedited examination of his patent application, leading to a considerable reduction in the time taken to obtain its possible grant. The Mexican Intellectual Property Office (IMPI) has PPH pilot programmes with the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), SIPO in China and the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM), and permanent PPH programmes with the USPTO and the Japanese Patent Office JPO.

The Malaysian Competition Act 2010 came into force on January 1 2012. It prohibits anti-competitive and abusive practices that would have an effect on competition in any market in Malaysia, irrespective of whether the commercial activity was carried out within or outside of Malaysia.

Are the two trade marks below confusingly similar? The Japan Patent Office (JPO) answered yes and invalidated the newest trade mark (top) owned by Crocodile International. It filed suit seeking cancellation of the JPO's decision. The IP High Court accepted Crocodile's arguments and rescinded the JPO's decision (on August 31 2010). The High Court's decision was made final by the Supreme Court. The case, and the arguments involved, provide some interesting points.

In a hotly anticipated decision, on April 2 in Novartis v UOI, the Supreme Court rejected a patent application claiming the beta crystal modification of imatinib mesylate. The application was rejected since the patentee failed to establish that the claimed polymorph exhibited enhanced efficacy over previously known forms, under section 3(d) of the Patents Act.

Patentability of embryonic stem cells in Europe has been a matter of debate for more than a decade. While the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO ruled in G2/06 Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation that on the basis of rule 28(c) of the EPC, which is based on the implementation of the Biotech Directive, a patent may not be granted for a product which at the filing date could be prepared exclusively by a method which necessarily involved the destruction of the human embryo, national courts in EU member states had more difficulties in coming to a clear conclusion on this issue.

French law provides that any interested party may ask for the revocation of a third party's trade mark that has not been used within the past five years.

The European Patent Office has released its 2012 statistics, which show that the number of new patent applications filed reached an all-time high of 257,744. This is an increase of more than 5% on 2011.

Article 44(4) of the China Trademark Law provides that "where the use of the registered trade mark has ceased for three consecutive years, the Trademark Office shall order the registrant to rectify the situation within a specified period or even cancel the registered trade mark". Accordingly, article 39.2 of the Implementing Regulations of the Trademark Law of the People's Republic of China provide that "any person may apply to the CTMO for cancellation of a trade mark registered for more than three years on the basis of non-use for three consecutive years, and the CTMO shall require the registrant to furnish proof of use of the registered trade mark for the past three years. If no proof of use, nor justifiable reason of the non-use is furnished or the proof is invalid, the CTMO shall cancel the registered trade mark".

On March 1 2013, the Canadian government introduced legislation aimed at fighting counterfeiting. Bill C-56, known as the Combating Counterfeit Products Act (CCPA), would amend several acts, including the Copyright Act and Trade-marks Act, with a view to strengthening the ability of IP owners to fight counterfeiters acting on a commercial scale.

Our previous article (March 2013, p 140) explained how the Belgian Patent Office (BPO) applies a particularly broad interpretation of article 19, section 7 of the Belgian Patent Law (BOW) as a lex specialis, in order to overrule article 20, section 1 (the "one catches all" redress) as lex generalis, denying applicants any means of redress if something was wrong in the claiming of priority, even when the BPO should have clearly noticed the error.