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On April 28 2006 the EU Council adopted a Regulation on the compulsory licensing of patents and supplementary protection certificates (SPCs). The Regulation establishes a procedure for the grant of licences covering all acts necessary for the purpose of manufacturing pharmaceutical products and exporting them to (broadly) developing and least developed countries affected by public health problems.

David Highet is chief IP counsel for Becton Dickinson and a trustee of the American Intellectual Property Law Education Foundation. He spoke to MIP about patent trolls, changing approaches to patents and the need for diversity in the IP profession

Intellectual property owners have thus far been sceptical about effective enforcement of IP rights in India. Long delays in litigation and poor enforceability of court orders made IP enforcement close to impossible in India for several years. Things are looking brighter now.

During a recent meeting on intellectual property piracy in Geneva, the Motion Picture Association of America and Interpol applauded the government of Malaysia for its stringent measures and its commitment in fighting against pirated intellectual property within the country.

On April 25, a new Act – 221/2006 Coll on Enforcement of Industrial Property Rights – entered into force. It is based on Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament.

Until recently, the federal legislation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) did not deal with the challenges that arose from the advent of the digital age. The only law that dealt with some of those issues was the Electronic Transactions and Commerce Law Number 2 of 2002 of the Emirate of Dubai, a law that applied only to the Emirate of Dubai. This year, two new laws, Federal Law Number 1 of 2006 regarding Electronic Transactions and Commerce, and Federal Law Number 2 of 2006 regarding Cyber Crime, were issued to deal respectively with e-commerce and cyber crime issues. These laws were issued to regulate and meet the challenges of contracts concluded online.

In Germany a declaratory action is an established instrument to react to an unwarranted warning letter. But whether it is necessary to send a counter-warning in response to a first warning letter so as to prevent an award of costs pursuant to S 93 ZPO (Code of Civil Procedure) when filing a declaratory action has up to now been a moot point. Different courts have handed down different decisions on this point. The District Court of Cologne confirmed the necessity of a counter-warning letter to prevent an award of costs pursuant to S 93 ZPO. Several Higher Regional Courts, however, denied the basic necessity of sending a counter-warning letter.

Section 40(3) of the Australian Patents Act 1990 sets out that the claims of a patent specification must be "fairly based on the matter described in the specification". Essentially, this means that the support for the full breadth of the claims must be found in the description. This is one of the most contentious areas of Australian patent law.

Turkey issued its patent law first in 1879, making it one of the earliest countries to do so, but unfortunately no further steps were taken until 1994, when the Turkish Patent Institute was founded. The Turkish Patent Decree Law, comparable to modern provisions, was published in 1995 and was followed by related regulations and several amendments.

Last year the Swedish Customs Service made more interventions against counterfeits than ever before. More than 280,000 items with a market value of some SEK127 million ($17.5 million) were seized. This is good news for trade mark owners and owners of other forms of IP. However, it must be assumed that only a tiny fraction of counterfeit goods are being detected and there is much to suggest that the importation of counterfeit goods will continue to increase and reach new, record-high levels. So the Swedish authorities are now devoting ever-increasing resources to hunting down counterfeiters.