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Two recent cases in the still blurred area of market dominance have left pharmaceutical companies holding their breath. Sophie Lawrance and Pat Treacy examine the cases and whether the way in which competition law is enforced is becoming an obstacle to the pharmaceutical industry's success

In an important pro-patentee decision handed down in June, Japan's Supreme Court affirmed a patent holder's right to seek an injunction against an infringer, even if the patentee has granted an exclusive licence over the invention. John Tessensohn and Shusaku Yamamoto explain what the ruling means in practice

NIC-Argentina (www.nic.ar) has implemented new rules governing the .ar country code top-level domain (cc-TLD) domain names. NIC has put into force Article 5 of the domain name regulation, which was put on hold at the time the rules were enacted in 2000. Article 5 sets out that domain name registrations shall be valid for one-year terms, counted from registration date, and may be renewed indefinitely. Renewal applications will be received in the last month that the registration is in force, and domain names that are not renewed shall be eliminated from the Registry automatically.

Applicants interested in protecting business methods and software-related inventions in Mexico are not completely prevented from protecting these types of inventions if certain considerations are taken into account. Although Article 19, Section III of the Law of Industrial Property expressly deems business methods per se and software per se to be unpatentable, an applicant can rest assured that the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) has been allowing and issuing business methods and software-related patents.

India has introduced a product patent regime for pharmaceutical inventions and those patent applications filed through the WTO/mail box are now being examined. There are approximately 6,000 of these patent applications in the pipeline, which will be examined under the amended Patents Act (which no longer contains the controversial section that provided only limited term process patent protection for food and drugs). The amended law places a number of interesting limitations on pharmaceutical product patents originating through the WTO/mail box. One such limitation is that the rights of a patentee (of a pharmaceutical product invention) only begin from the date that the patent is granted. This provision considerably restricts the patentee's rights to institute an infringement action from the date that they file the application, which is the date from which the term of the patent is calculated in all other cases.

South Korea officially signed a free trade agreement (FTA) on August 4 2005 with Singapore, South Korea's largest south-east Asian trading partner.

The Hangzhou Administration for Industry and Commerce (AIC), the local body responsible for administrative enforcement of trade mark rules, appears to be following the practice of Beijing's local AIC by giving special protection to certain well-known brands.

The re-establishment of patent rights in the Netherlands is based on Section 23 of the Netherlands Patents Act 1995. The requirements correspond to Section 122 of the European Patent Convention, except from the two-month term which, in the Netherlands is worded "as soon as possible".

For its impact on patent owners, Phillips v AWH Corporation is one of the most important cases of the past decade. Thankfully, says Irv Feit, the Federal Circuit found a compromise between the competing approaches to claim interpretation

Mexico's patent regime had, until recently, created a situation that allowed untested generics to come to market. But, says Luis Schmidt, a recent change in the law should improve standards