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There are signs that Virginia’s eastern district, known since 1990 as the rocket docket, has taken on more than it can chew.

When Charlene Barshefsky arrives in China in mid-February for the US Trade Representative’s regular visit, she will have her hands full.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has been active this summer in many areas of patent law. Some of its most noteworthy holdings are briefly reviewed below:

Joel Smith, Andrea Montanari and Simona Cazzaniga provide an update on the complex Italian regime for protecting industrial designs, in the light of new legislation

Car maker Porsche has taken action against no less than 130 Internet domain names using its trade marks in an in rem suit.

Managing intellectual property has always been a headache in Russia. Way back in the USSR at the time of total control of everything, intellectual property along with all other things belonged to the State and the inventor did not have any right to the product of his labour. When the iron curtain fell, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. A rather liberal Patent Law was adopted in 1992. It provided that the inventor or his employer would own and dispose of his work at will. It also gave ample opportunities to the applicant to patent his inventions abroad and sell them if he chose to do so. There were no restrictions on where or what to patent which could jeopardize the security of the State. True, the Law contained provisions to the effect that there would be a special law on secret inventions. Unfortunately, that law has not seen light and there are not even signs of it ever being discussed at any forum.

South Africa has acceded to the Patent Cooperation Treaty. The accession procedure was completed on March 16 1999 with the result that an applicant for an international patent application (PCT) can now designate South Africa (ZA) as one of the countries in which the international patent application will be validated. Accordingly, it is no longer necessary for an applicant for an international patent application to file a separate national patent application in South Africa (in addition to the international patent application) in order to extend patent rights to the territory of South Africa. Instead, such an applicant can now cover South Africa merely by ticking an appropriate box on the application papers at the time of filing the international patent application.

The problem of whether a claimed invention in relation to a selection invention is patentable may arise not only in the chemical, but also in many other fields.

Music copyright and the Internet

Exhaustion of rights, as an exception to the rights afforded by IP laws, has been recognized in the laws of many countries in the world. In general terms, it implies that the owner of intellectual property rights cannot oppose the further trading of products embodying its rights, if and to the extent that such products have been marketed by or with its consent. Exhaustion of rights marks the border between intellectual property rights and those of the buyer of a product or copy embodying the IP rights.