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James Nurton, Washington DC

Peter Ollier, Hong Kong

We suspect the factory we use in Asia is manufacturing more of our product and selling it out the back door. What can we do?

Personal data and data privacy are governed in Argentina by Law N° 25,326 (Personal Data Protection Law). The main objective of the Argentine personal data protection legal regime is the full protection of personal data recorded in data files, registries, databases, or other technical means of data treatment, either public or private, for the purpose of providing reports in order to guarantee the honour and individual privacy, as well as the access to information that may be recorded about such persons, in accordance with the provisions of Section 43, third paragraph of the Argentine Constitution.

On October 1 2009, the Law on Simplification and Modernisation of the German Patent Law entered into force.

The recent Patents Court decision in Edwards Lifesciences v Cook Biotech highlights the dangers of filing a patent application before ensuring that the interests of any co-inventors have been assigned. The proceedings concerned the validity and infringement of Cook's patent for an artificial heart valve. Mr Justice Kitchin found that the patent was invalid for obviousness over cited prior art and, in addition, had not been infringed by Edwards' device. During the proceedings an issue arose regarding the validity of the claimed priority date for the patent application. This was significant as it would determine which prior art was relevant and in particular, whether an article published close to the original filing date was available as prior art.

Under Section 18 of the Thai Trade Mark Act, applicants are entitled to appeal to the Board of Trade Marks when the Trade Mark Registrar initially finds their mark unregistrable, and the decision of the Board shall be deemed final. However, many trade mark owners file a complaint appealing the Board's decision with the Central Intellectual Property and International Trade Court (IP&IT Court), and later file an appeal with the Supreme Court if the IP&IT Court rules against them.

Article 17, paragraph 4 of Law Number 99 of July 23 2009, the so-called Development Law, which came into force on August 15 2009 has already been repealed.

In order to enforce an IP right, it is first essential to be able to prove the extent to which it is infringed. The Belgian Judiciary Code offers a particularly powerful tool for the owners of certain IP rights, such as patents, to achieve this in the form of the descriptive seizure.

In a recent domain name dispute decision (ZA2009-0028), the adjudicator ruled that the domain name registration of gardenmaster.co.za was abusive despite the fact that the registrant had been using the Gardenmaster trade mark for longer than the complainant.