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Ersin Dereligil of Destek Patent Inc outlines Turkey's patent regime and highlights recent efforts to bring it up to European standards

It has long been accepted that the UK does not acknowledge image rights as a distinct legal concept. In the first half of a two-part article, Isabel Davies and Tom Scourfield look at the face of image rights in the UK following a recent House of Lords judgment

The US Supreme Court's decision in KSR v Teleflex threatens to change the balance of power between patent owners and alleged infringers in the US. How has it been received by the USPTO and courts?

US beer maker Anheuser-Busch has won a victory over nine so-called shadow companies in Hong Kong using an approach other companies may now consider replicating

The USPTO Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences should rely on evidence submitted by parties rather than its own expertise in judging who is the rightful owner of a patent

The manager of a shopping complex in Sarawak has been charged with allowing a tenant to sell pirated CDs in what is believed to be the first criminal landlord liability case in Malaysia

In a case between Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC) and Philips, the Supreme Administrative Court of Taiwan made a final ruling on April 4 2007. The Court held that a patent pool that included patents owned by Philips, Sony and Taiyo Yuden which were licensed in a package to Taiwan's CD-R manufacturers was not a concerted action. It upheld the ruling of the Taipei High Administrative Court to revoke the decision of the FTC and said that the term "concerted action" used in Article 14 of the Fair Trade Act refers to the action of enterprises with a competitive relationship. Such competitive relationship will be deemed to exist where the goods or services provided by the enterprises are substitutable by each other's goods or services. Since the CD-R manufacturers must use the orange book-compliant techniques covered by the patents owned by Philips, Sony and Taiyo Yuden in combination in order to produce CD-Rs, and since CD-Rs cannot be produced using any one of the patents alone, the Court held that the patents owned by Philips, Sony and Taiyo Yuden are complementary to each other rather than substitutable for each other. As such, there is no competitive relationship among them.

Since OHIM opened, it has received more than half a million applications for Community trade marks. Thousands have been rejected, and thousands more opposed prompting frustrated would-be trade mark owners to go to the European courts. How can they maximize their chances of winning? Emma Barraclough finds out

With regard to pending marketing authorization applications, the register of the National Agency for Medicines (NAM) has so far disclosed only the filing date, the number of the applicants and applications and the active ingredient to a third party. In accordance with a recent decision from the Supreme Administrative Court, a third party is now also entitled to obtain, upon request, information on the identity of the applicant and the type of the application before the marketing authorization is granted.

Even in the first Austrian Patent Law of 1897, there was a special provision that the Court had to terminate the effect of an interlocutory injunction if the defendant offered an adequate security. The Court had only to judge whether the amount offered was adequate. Over the years, people concerned complained that it was impossible to enforce a preliminary injunction since defendants nearly always paid the security as it was generally set at an affordable price. This unsatisfactory situation remained until a major patent law reform in 1988 when this stringent provision was changed into a possibility. The Court could now on its own finding terminate a preliminary injunction for an adequate security by considering the specific circumstances. Since then, in rare cases the effect of preliminary injunctions was terminated for a specific act, but not generally (for example to allow the construction of certain buildings to be finished).