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The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand is implementing some changes to patent practice in New Zealand that are worthy of mention.

Very recently (February 11 2009), the infringement court of The Hague issued its decision in Novartis v Johnson & Johnson (J&J) on the infringement of European patent EP 0 819 258 owned by Novartis. Some remarkable issues have been decided in this case.

A recent case at the Delhi High Court has dealt with the overlap between copyright and design protection and its application to the fashion industry in India. The questions addressed by the case were, firstly, whether drawings or sketches are artistic works and, secondly, whether the object or commercial intention be tested while applying Section 15 of the Copyright Act 1957, which bars copyright protection in drawings which are repeated more than fifty times.

Section 33(3) of the Several Rules on Evidence in Civil Proceedings states that parties to a normal trial proceeding have not less than 30 days to file evidence. However, due to new circumstances as well as different understanding of the courts, on December 11 2008 the Supreme Court issued the Supreme Court Interpretation on the Application of Regulation on Evidence in Civil Proceedings, providing further explanations on time periods in filing evidence.

Elisa Cooper advises brand owners to maximise the potential of a domain name portfolio in an economic downturn

Egypt

The Netherlands Patent Office has pioneered the concept of non-examined patents. James Nurton spoke to its president, Guus Broesterhuizen, about SMEs, reform in Europe and the proposals for a Community patent

The Netherlands and Belgium have well-established systems for IP enforcement. And, explain Armand Killan and Jean-Christophe Troussel of Bird & Bird, they have been enhanced by the implementation of the IP Enforcement Directive

Following the Federal Circuit's decision in In re Bilski (Fed Cir 2008), when a method claim is not tied to a particular machine or apparatus and does not transform a particular article into a different state or thing, the patent claim will be held invalid for failing to meet the so-called machine-or-transformation test for determining patent eligible subject matter under § 101 of the US Patent Act. When the Court reaffirmed this test, it prompted commentators to wonder whether many existing business method patents might be invalid. The impact of Bilski on the future of business-method patents is a subject of much concern among the intellectual property community. However, pharmaceutical method patents claiming an abstract mental process about a natural phenomenon may also be at risk.

With the marketplace becoming increasingly international in scope and the availability of goods and services on the internet continuing to expand, trade mark owners are perpetually faced with the challenge of monitoring and protecting their brands. Obtaining a trade mark registration and then simply relying on employees to watch for new uses of trade marks by competitors are not sufficient steps to adequately protect a brand. If a brand owner does not diligently monitor the marketplace for potential infringement, by the time the brand owner learns of a third party's infringing use of the mark, the damage caused by such use often has already been done and enforcement options have become limited. Therefore, as a company's business grows, it is important that they develop a comprehensive trade mark protection strategy to safeguard their brand from infringement by third parties and to prevent the dilution of their valuable trade mark rights.