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Emma Barraclough, London

Shahnaz Mahmud, New York

Shahnaz Mahmud, London

Emma Barraclough, London

In a recent judgment concerning interim measures (case Ö 566-06 – Roche Aktiebolag v Orifarm AB – June 9 2006), the Swedish Supreme Court ruled it objectively necessary for a parallel trader to relabel an imported pharmaceutical product with another company's registered trade mark in order to gain effective access to the Swedish market. This exception to the exclusive rights provided by a trade mark was found justified with respect to patient safety and resistance from consumers to a product marketed under a different name to that marketed by the trade mark proprietor.

A company that has a trade mark filing in place in a foreign jurisdiction has multiple options when considering an expansion of its trade mark rights into the United States. Specifically, US trade mark law provides several mechanisms pursuant to which a foreign trade mark owner can use the priority established by a foreign trade mark filing when making a filing in the United States.

With Vietnam's impending entry into the WTO, there have been many recent developments in intellectual property law, including:

One year after fining AstraZeneca €60 million, the European Commission has finally published its decision in a limited version proposed by AstraZeneca.

As the use of slogans to promote and build awareness of goods and services becomes a universal phenomenon, companies who use slogans and have them splashed across their products or at their place of business have become more aware of the need to protect the slogans as trade marks, in addition to protecting their traditional marks. This is because consumers are now more aware of the various slogans being used and it can be argued that slogans can be considered to be part of the brand itself.

The European Patent Convention (EPC), which provides for a centralized procedure for granting of patents in Europe and the establishment of the European Patent Office (EPO), was signed on October 5 1973. The EPC was extensively revised at a Diplomatic Conference held in Munich in November 2000 and the revised text termed EPC 2000. It was agreed that the EPC 2000 would come into force two years after ratification by 15 contracting states. A number of new states have joined the EPC since November 2000 and they have all agreed to ratify EPC 2000. Thus, when on December 13 2005 Greece ratified EPC 2000, Greece became the 15th state to deposit its instrument of ratification. The EPC 2000 will therefore come into force on December 13 2007, at the latest. Any contracting state of the EPC that has not ratified EPC 2000 by this date will cease to be a contracting state of the EPC.