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On January 8 2007, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a measure which aims to strengthen the value of Chinese brands. By giving local brands a special status, and by promoting and protecting these brands, it hopes to boost the sale and export of local branded goods. As these gain popularity, it also hopes that the competitiveness of Chinese goods as a whole in the world market will increase.

The Patent Appeal Board in Canada recently issued its decision following a hearing at which we challenged the decision of an examiner regarding inter alia the patentability of subject matter. The claims were directed to a system for trading diamonds from remote computer terminals in communication with a host computer, including the use of data structures for presenting diamond characteristics in an orderly and structured manner. The examiner's rejection reflected a trend in Canada of examiners rejecting claims to less than fully tangible inventions, or to what can be loosely called business methods.

The European Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions 98/44/EC was transformed into national law on June 10 2005. The Austrian Parliament has established a special monitoring committee to manage this transformation. This committee (the Biopatent Monitoring Committee) had the task of monitoring the impact of this transformation into Austrian law on:

Recently, the Full Federal Court prononunced on the operation of the Australian copyright provisions for websites that contain hyperlinks.

Manufacturers of medicinal products are legally obliged to obtain regulatory approval for their product before marketing of that product may begin. However, where different salts, esters, ethers, isomers, complexes or derivatives of a brand (on-patent) drug are made by a generic company, and these differ significantly in properties with regard to safety and/or efficacy when compared to the patented drug, additional clinical data demonstrating the safety and/or efficacy of that generic drug must be submitted by the generic company to the marketing authority.

Article 15 of the TRIPs Agreement provides that combinations of colours – among other kinds of signs – can be registered as trade marks. Article 1 of the Argentine Trade Mark Act 22,362 specifically requires that combinations of colours can be registered as trade marks provided they are applied in a fixed place on products or containers. Article 2 says that the natural or inherent colour of the products or a single colour applied on them cannot be considered to be a trade mark.

The draft legislation discussed in the MIP briefing on Ethiopia in May 2006 was promulgated on July 7 2006 under The Trade Mark Registration and Protection Proclamation 501/2006 (the Proclamation).

Acacia Technologies: an aggressive patent troll that feeds off the litigation fears of large corporations, or the champion of small technology companies who might not know how to go about enforcing their patents? Shahnaz Mahmud weighs up the evidence

Foreign IP owners used to think that China was reluctant to grant well-known mark status to their trade marks. They need to think again, says Huang Hui, as he explains how brand owners can use the rules to maximize their rights

One of the consequences of the separation of Serbia and Montenegro is the overhaul of the domain name system in the two countries. Vesna Gakovic and Kathryn Szymczyk explain why the new rules are more welcoming for international applicants