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Rights owners will be happy to hear that the Dubai Customs Authority has recently announced its plans to set up a dedicated Intellectual Property Unit (IPU) to help curb the import, export and transshipment of counterfeit goods and products through all ports, including the Jebel Ali Free Zone Port. This is the first unit of its kind in the region and promises a brighter future for international brand owners.

Singapore residents must file their patent application in Singapore first or obtain permission from the Registrar of Patents if they want to file a foreign patent application first. This provision, outlined in section 34 of the Singapore Patents Act 1994, does not apply to patent applications first filed outside Singapore by a person resident outside Singapore.

Former US presidential candidate Ross Perot has backed what is said to be the first investment fund to focus exclusively on companies with valuable intellectual property assets.

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 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 practice of advertising one's own products by knocking a competitor's products or services is becoming increasingly common among companies in Europe. But are the legislators keeping up with the pace? Jeremy Dickerson looks at how the law is changing to deal with the issues

National laws on patent construction may not be harmonized but a series of recent cases in Europe and the US point towards a seemingly comparable approach taken by the courts. Ian Karet and Nigel Jones of Linklaters provide more insight in an in-depth review of some of the most relevant cases

Harmonizing EU laws and practices across all member states is one of the key goals of the European Commission and EU legislators. But how successful has this process been in the IP field, and how has it affected IP-owning businesses? Paul Joseph of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer explains