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Rule 126 of the Philippine Rules of Court says that a search warrant cannot be issued except upon probable cause. In the case of Sony Music Entertainment (Phils), et al v Hon. Judge Dolores Español et al (G.R. No 156804, March 14 2005), Sony learned this rule the hard way.

In view of the high priority the Malaysian government gives to intellectual property, the Malaysian Intellectual Property Corporation (MyIPO) has undertaken the task of speeding up patent registration in the country. As of last year, at least 33,000 patent applications had been filed with MyIPO and that figure is expected to rise sharply. In view of this huge growth and the impending backlog of applications, the Minister of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs has announced that MyIPO will hire between 42 and 100 external examiners to help it assess and examine patent applications. These external examiners will come from various technical organizations, including the Standards and Industrial Research Institute (SIRIM). In addition to being a source of external examiners, SIRIM is also training an additional 500 patent examiners who will eventually be recruited by MyIPO to assist in expediting the registration process.

As reported in the April issue of MIP, the implementation of the so-called biotech directive (EU directive 98/44/EC) into the German Patent Act (GPA) has become effective. This implementation, however, does not only affect material patent law with respect to biotechnological inventions, but also led to a change of §24 GPA regulating the requirements of compulsory licences.

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.