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David Paris explains how judicial reforms of damages law have shaped analysis of compensation in patent cases, and why such theories could soon spread to trade secrets and design patents cases

Europe’s Cooperation Fund promises to offer new tools to help trade mark and design users. With its suite of services going live this month, James Nurton visited Alicante to find out how the work is going

International filing work is becoming commoditised and the providers are standing between attorneys and their clients. Duncan Hart suggests how IP firms should respond

An AIPPI special, with some suspect marketing of Helsinki and the Nigerian group teetering on the edge of expulsion

Vladimir Biriulin and Evgeny Alexandrov of Gorodissky & Partners explain to Simon Crompton the impact of Russia’s new IP court, the Customs union and other factors on trade marks in the country

The four biggest providers of patent search systems are constantly updating their functionality. Christopher Jagalla highlights changes in the two years since the last Managing IP survey

A common objective of a brand owner when entering into a licensing agreement is to ensure that its licensee assumes all responsibility for manufacturing the licensed products and all liability for consequences as a result thereof. While the typical trade mark licence includes certain indemnification provisions aimed at ensuring that the licensor achieves this objective, a few recent court decisions have highlighted instances where such standard indemnification provisions do not sufficiently protect licensors. Such decisions reveal an emerging issue with respect to product liability that brand owners engaged in licensing their trade marks must pay careful attention to, namely the possibility that they will be held liable for injuries resulting from the use of a product made by its licensee even when the brand owner is not directly involved in either the manufacture or sale of the products.

Having a single-class system, a trade mark owner seeking registration in Thailand for the same mark in different classes will be required by the Trade Marks Registrar to 'associate' its marks. Section 14 of the Thai Trade Marks Act states that the Registrar may order an applicant of similar or identical marks, relating to goods either in the same class or in related classes, to associate these marks to avoid confusion as to the owner of the mark.

According to the Patent Law, where a statutory or designated deadline in a patent application or other patent-related procedures is not met, any belated attempts to further prosecute or take procedural actions will be refused unless the failure to meet the deadline is due to force majeure or other factors not attributable to the applicant. In view of such strict and inflexible stipulations, it is not unusual for patentees to lose their hard-earned rights simply through an oversight.

A recent decision by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court has ended a 12-year battle between LEGO System and Mega Brands over the validity of Lego's three-dimensional building block trade mark registrations in Switzerland. The Supreme Court has now confirmed the nullity of Lego's respective trade mark registrations on grounds of technical necessity of the registered building block shapes.