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If a major corporation appends its famous house mark to a registered mark owned by another party, is there a conflict? In the appeal case of Registrar of Trade Marks v Woolworths Ltd, the Full Federal of Australia, by a margin of two to one, allowed an application for WOOLWORTHS METRO to be accepted, notwithstanding several earlier METRO marks each of which related to similar goods or services. The Court, at trial and appeal, rejected the Registrar's contention that the marks were deceptively similar.

Customs - the INTA's perspective

The use of the Internet in Romania is still in its infancy. So is the legal structure for registering domain names. Daniel Plosca and Lucien Enescu, of Rominvent in Bucharest, look at existing structures and explains what action businesses should take.

Seattle leaves issues unresolved

We all know that obtaining patent protection internationally requires considerable funds, the average probably being $ 5,000 per country. For an individual inventor this can be a lot of money. However, it can also tighten a company´ s budget since companies generally have to seek patent protection for more than one product. It has thus become standard practice to base the decision for international filings on an early examination report which may be obtained in the country of first filing. It has further become good practice to file an international (PCT) application before the end of one year after the first national filing, thereby claiming convention priority, instead of going directly national at the end of the priority year. If the applicant asks for an international preliminary examination (IPE), there will be a further indication about the chances of obtaining national patents prior to converting the international application into national original applications.

US: A federal judge in San Francisco ruled December 7 that a patent for DNA analysis owned by Swiss biotechnology company Hoffman-La Roche was obtained by deliberately misleading the USPTO and is invalid. US District Judge Vaughn Walker upheld a challenge by Promega which argued that scientists got the patent in 1990 through false claims. Those scientists worked for Cetus, which sold rights to the patent to Hoffman La Roche in 1991. The patented substance is called Taq DNA Polymerase. Cetus inventors had convinced the patent office that they had a substance better than those developed in the 1980s. Hoffman-La Roche is appealing, and contends that the ruling invalidates the patent for only one form of Taq, and not for the more common and lucrative recombinant Taq.

In a recent decision of the appeals division of the Trade Mark Registry, the proprietor of a well known trade mark has for the first time since the introduction of the Trade Marks Act 1994 (TMA 1994) succeeded in preventing a third party from registering the same name for a completely different product.

In a major victory for a foreign patent owner, Pfizer has stopped a local company infringing its patent for fluconazole.

The rapid expansion of e-commerce is forcing countries to look again at how to regulate trade and intellectual property. By Fernando Becerril of Becerril, Coca & Becerril, Mexico City

The BSA is declaring a 30-day truce on UK companies using illegal software, from March 6 2000. The campaign is offering free use of an auditing tool which will check for unlicensed software on company systems.