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Confidential information relating can take the form of any business formula, process, R&D capabilities, client-related or operational information that ought to be protected as a trade secret. Any breach in handling such confidential information violates the IP rights of the concerned party and has been pursued through the courts on many occasions. The Delhi High Court has deliberated on the misuse of confidential information relating to industrial drawings and the grant of permanent injunction to restrain those drawings in case of Action Construction Equipment v Gulati Industrial Fabric P Ltd IA no 10073/2006 IN CS(OS) no 1740/2006.

On December 28 2009 the Supreme People's Court of China issued the Interpretation on Several Issues as to the Application of Laws Concerning Patent Infringement Cases. The Interpretation came into effect on January 1 2010.

The Canadian Federal Court emphasised the importance of filing a patent application with the correct set of figures in Scannex Technologies, LLC v Attorney General of Canada (2009 FC 1068). After a US patent application was filed, a corresponding international patent application was filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) with a different and thus incorrect set of figures. This PCT application entered the national phase in Canada as a Canadian patent application. The applicant requested that the Commissioner of Patents substitute the incorrect figures in the Patent Application with correct figures pursuant to section 8 of the Patent Act, which affords the Commissioner the discretion to correct clerical errors. In support, the applicant filed an affidavit stating that incorrect figures were filed due to the unintentional error of a clerk of the applicant's agent in the US, and filed a certified copy of the US patent application containing the correct figures. Notwithstanding the applicant's efforts, the Commissioner refused to correct the figures. The applicant then applied to the Federal Court for judicial review.

The Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO has recently decided case G 1/07 dealing with the exclusion from patentability of surgical methods.

In the Austrian legal system a concept or defence based on acquiescence or past tolerance of behaviour is unknown – only the statute of limitation exists. Acquiescence has been implanted into it as alien element only in the Trade Mark Law and in the Law Against Unfair Competition as far as it regulates commercially used signs when Austria in 1999 finally implemented fully Article 9 of the EU Trade Mark Harmonisation Directive. No wonder that Austrian trade mark owners and courts still struggle with this concept.

The obligation to protect undisclosed test or other data necessary for the marketing approval of pharmaceutical or agricultural chemical products established by Article 39.3 of TRIPs is a matter of intense debate. It can be argued that scientific data protection constitutes a new and autonomous IP category, and that acknowledging data protection as a new IP category is the only suitable way to protect the data originator's right. GATT- TRIPs provides this acknowledgment.

Many African countries emerged from colonialism with common-law heritages. When considering treaties such as Paris, Madrid, the PCT and those pertaining to ARIPO, practitioners have been guided by the common-law rule: an international agreement can only become part of the domestic law of a subscribing country when it has expressly been enacted into that national law by an Act of Parliament.

Wayne Condon and Eliza Saunders explain how IP owners should incorporate innovation patents into their IP strategy down under

The false marking troll is on the prowl following two recent court rulings. Thomas Turano advises companies how to steer clear of these clever critters

Battles between publishers and Amazon over the right price to sell e-Books have highlighted the difficulty of pricing content online, says Peter Ollier