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When the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO) granted compulsory licences for five CD-R patents owned by Philips to Gigastorage (a small local manufacturer of CD-Rs) in July 2004, it might not have foreseen the amount of international attention the decision would draw. TIPO's decision, confirmed on appeal, was based on Article 76.1 of the current Patent Act, which stipulates that in addition to coping with national emergencies and non-profit-seeking use of a patent for enhancement of public welfare, a compulsory licence, if used predominantly for the supply of the domestic market, may be granted to an applicant who has offered reasonable terms and conditions to a patentee but has failed to reach an agreement with the patentee within a considerable period of time.

Although the law used to enable Customs to enforce IP rights in Mexico, this year has seen a major advance in the fight against counterfeiters and pirates. In January and following intense work by federal enforcement authorities and IP owners, the brand new early alert anti-counterfeit system was initiated. The first alerts have so far led to 16 seizures of counterfeits.

Back in the 19th century the countries signing the Paris Convention agreed that designations contradicting morals or capable of insulting religious feelings should not be registered as trade marks. It is very rare if ever that people apply for obscene trade marks. It may happen that a word trade mark in one country has a neutral meaning but while being pronounced and heard by people in another country has quite a different meaning. In that case, there is a question.

On April 3 2008, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPhil) held the first of its two scheduled stakeholders' forum for the year. The objective of the forum was to provide speedy and effective legal remedies to improve the quality of the decisions rendered and to promote the Bureau of Legal Affairs (BLA), the adjudication division of IPOPhil, as a forum of choice and to promote mediation as an alternative means to resolve disputes. The forum was attended by over a hundred practitioners, and presided by the director-general himself, Atty Adrian Cristobal Jr Some of the suggestions given by the IP practitioners are below.

In Malaysia an effective method of enforcement that can be used by the proprietor of a trade mark is to apply for what is known as a trade description order (TDO) in the High Court. This application is made pursuant to the Trade Descriptions Act 1972. The order granted declares that the particular mark named in the TDO that infringes the applicant's trade mark is a false trade description.

The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (IPONZ) recently completed a review of its practice of raising objections based on morality considerations, and has just released new guidelines that may cause difficulties for some biotechnology patent applications.

In a recent decision, dated February 14 2008 (BGH I ZR 69/04), the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) referred three questions to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling on the interpretation of Article 14 (1) of EC/510/06 which concerns the protection of geographical indications and designations of origin.

On April 10 2007, the famous French luxury brand Louis Vuitton Malletier filed an action with the Beijing First Intermediate People's Court against Mr Wang, owner of design patent registration no 02367907.7, for his unauthorized copying of its trade marks: (Louis Vuitton's corresponding Chinese mark), and , and all registered in Class 18 in respect of, among others: travelling bags, women's handbags and shopping bags for application on bags, the subject matter of Wang's design patent registration. Wang's registered design patent consists of the shape of a handbag.