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A monthly column devoted to IP curiosities and controversies, named in honour of John of Utynam – who became the world's first recorded patent owner in 1449

Emma Barraclough, Hong Kong

Sam Mamudi, New York

Sam Mamudi, New York

MIP received the following letter from US patent owner Vergil L Daughtery, III, in reaction to Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner's article on 'How to fix the US patent system', in the May 2005 issue

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.