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Graphic health warnings have hit the tobacco industry and are threatening to jump to other consumer goods sectors as well. Toe Su Aung warns that the regulators' increased use of shock therapy labelling could seriously impinge on the value of brands and IP rights

MIP's latest survey of the largest IP practices in Asia, Europe and the US shows how a growing trend towards consolidation is re-shaping IP practices in many parts of the world

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

Canada: The Supreme Court of Canada refused to allow the Canadian Private Copying Collective to appeal a December 2004 Federal Court of Appeal decision that a levy on memory permanently embedded in digital audio recorders, commonly referred to as the piracy tax, was invalid. The tax, which Canada's Copyright Board promoted as a protection against copyright infringement, had been in place for a year.

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

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 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".

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

On July 13 2005, the English Court of Appeal handed down its judgment in the British Horseracing Board (BHB) v William Hill case. The decision ended a dispute that started in the High Court about five years ago and has involved two trips to the Court of Appeal and one to the European Court of Justice (ECJ).