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Marcela Waksman Ejnisman and Andreia de Andrade Gomes Moreira de Souza of Tozzini, Freire, Teixeira e Silva Advogados

A recent decision by the European Court of First Instance (CFI) has denied the Irish boy band Westlife registration of the Westlife name as a Community trade mark.

In a widely watched patent infringement case, main board-listed Trek 2000 International, an innovator and a patentee in Universal Serial Bus (USB) portable mass storage technology, recently achieved a significant victory in enforcing its patent against four defendants.

Over recent years in the Middle East, we have seen a massive increase in the use of mobile phone technology and included within that has been the arrival of several operators offering ringtones. So far in the Middle East, most of what has been on offer are polytones and monotones. Truetones are only just now beginning to break into the market place. Polytones and monotones are reproductions of a recording involving a publishing royalty whereas a truetone uses the actual recording of a song. It is becoming pretty popular in the Middle East for a mobile user to download his or her favourite sound recording into a mobile phone to be used for example as an incoming call alert.

In an effort to reduce its backlog of cases, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPhil) is introducing summary procedures for inter partes cases and conducted a public hearing on May 21 2005 to encourage comments on its proposal from practitioners. Inter partes proceedings refer to cancellation of patents, registration of layout design, trade mark registration, trade mark opposition and petition for compulsory licensing.

India's Patent Office has published a draft Manual of Patent Practice & Procedure. The manual runs to 166 pages and contains 14 chapters and three annexes. In the introduction, the Controller of Patents says that the principal objective of the manual is to establish uniformity and homogeneity in the processing of patent applications in India. This is an indirect admission that there has been little uniformity and consistency in India's patent prosecution system so far, particularly in the examination system. In particular, there has been a considerable degree of subjectivity in the way that the structure and functions of claims have been dealt with, the most critical aspect of the patent prosecution system.

On April 19 2005 the Senate approved a Decree amending some articles of the Law of Industrial Property (LIP) and introducing new articles, all of them concerning well-known trade marks.

According to subsection 4 of new §1(a) of the German Patent Act (GPA) implementing EU Directive 98/44/EC, a claim to a naturally occurring DNA sequence must recite the use of the DNA. There appears to be a general understanding in the patent community that this proviso establishes purpose-limited protection for DNA sequences. There is no doubt that this notion finds support among members of the legislative bodies, whose statements on the subject show a clear inclination to exempt gene sequences from absolute compound protection.

The Korean National Assembly passed a new bill on May 3 to amend certain provisions of the Korean Patent Act governing restoration of patent rights. This new bill allows patentees to restore their patents in cases where they lapsed because patent annuity fees were not paid. The new law will become effective on September 1 this year.

More and more companies are transferring R&D operations to China to capitalize on the country's cheap, highly skilled scientists and localize their product development. But how should they get their IP out? Alan Adcock explains