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Simply because a trade mark owner is using their mark in the United States does not necessarily mean that the mark is eligible for registration in the US Patent and Trademark Office or that it would be prudent to make a filing for federal registration. Certain circumstances may exist which preempt the ability to register a mark on the USPTO's Principal Register or create a new risk associated with making such a filing.

On December 18 2007, the Regional Trial Court of Quezon City (RTC) under presiding Judge Reynaldo Daway found Avida Land Corporation (Avida) guilty of patent infringement and ordered it to pay inventor Edgardo Vasquez and his company Vasquez Building Systems Corporation (VBSC), P96.5 million ($2.37 million) in temperate, moral, exemplary damages and attorney's fees.

Costa Rica is and will be the last country to adhere to the DR-CAFTA Treaty. Its approval was subject to a popular referendum held at the end of 2007. At present, Congress is discussing the Treaty's corresponding implementation laws; these should be ready by March 2008.

The Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court recently ordered Generation 2000, a well-known Hong Kong fashion chain with over 400 franchised counters/outlets in China, as well as some of its franchisees in China, to pay Rmb20 million (around $2.8 million) to Zhao Hua for infringing his 2000 trade mark.

Last January, the Chilean Congress approved a bill establishing the National Institute of Industrial Property (INAPI). The draft law was sent to the Congress in 2000 on the initiative of the President, and aims to create a new autonomous agency in charge of the records and administration of industrial property in Chile, with a legal personality and its own assets. It is linked to the President of the Republic through the Ministry of the Economy. The chief of this entity will be a National Director, appointed directly by the President.

In many inventions relating to telecommunications or computers, the underlying novel idea resides in the modification of a signal to achieve some useful purpose. An example can be found in US patent application 09/211,928, which relates to the introduction of watermarks into signals to help protect media against unauthorized copying. Consistent with the general desirability of protecting an invention in its most basic form without limitation to any specific apparatus or method of implementation, the applicants sought to protect their underlying invention in the form of a claim directed to a signal, wherein the body of the claim defined the novel and useful characteristics of the signal. The US Federal Circuit (In re Nuijten, 84 USPQ 2d 1495), with a dissenting opinion, held that such a claim was not a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter", as required by US law, and as such was non-statutory subject matter.

In the first decision, the Austrian Supreme Patent and Trade Mark Senate (ASPTS) has found that in a declaratory action concerning the non-infringement of a patent the existing right (patent) as defined in the register shall form the basis of the proceedings. Thus, only the subject matter in dispute shall be compared with the subject matter of the patent. However, the validity of the claims of the patent on which the action is based shall not be the object of these declaratory proceedings.

A monthly column devoted to IP curiosities and controversies, named in honour of John of Utynam - who received the world's first recorded patent in 1449

The Board of Appeal of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) recently handed down a decision criticizing ARIPO's handling of a trade mark application (In the matter of Trade Mark Application No AP/M/2005/000303 Fones 4 U in the name of Langton Nyatsambo).

Recent case law has cast a wide net with the potential to catch patent owners making threats of patent infringement litigation in Australia.