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Claims such as "the number one" and "the best" are among those frequently made by advertisers for their products and services. Timothy Pinto examines what such claims mean and whether or not they are legal

The Singapore-based company and trade mark applicant, Future Enterprises, has for the second time in less than a year faced opposition to its three marks comprising the words "MacTea", "MacNoodles" and "MacChocolate" together with a "device of an eagle" in class 30.

Changes to Japan's patent law in the early months of 2004 will see lower fees in some cases and the abolition of the opposition system. The amendments to the invalidation appeal procedures are open to abuse and could end up harming patentees' rights, warn John Tessensohn and Shusaku Yamamoto

Worldwide forum on trade mark protection, Geneva, Switzerland, December 1-2. Details at www.inta.org

Europe must learn from the mistakes of the US and consider carefully the effect of stifling development before giving the green light to software patents, warns Brian Kahin

The European Commission proposes to make radical changes to technology licensing within Europe. The proposed new Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation (TTBER) is presented as a business-friendly liberalization of the European technology transfer regime. However, many commentators feel that these proposals will stifle technology transfer, considerably reduce the value of intellectual property rights, and may cause Europe to fall further behind the United States in the development of new technology industries.

The bankruptcy reform Organic Act 8/2003, published on July 9 this year, amended the Organic Act of the Judiciary and set up the commercial courts and the Community Trade Mark Court.

At its recent meeting, ICANN announced that it will push ahead with plans to increase the number of top-level domains. But trade mark owners are alarmed by the extra costs and opportunities for piracy that expansion will bring. Ingrid Hering reports

Since the 1990s, the Indian government's research branch has protected its most important advances with patents. Now the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research is moving on to exploiting those inventions through licensing. RA Mashelkar, CSIR’s director-general, spoke to Ralph Cunningham about the council's IP management strategy

There are two results of prosecuting trade mark applications in any part of the world: either you obtain a registration, or you do not. However, in Mexico there has not been a trade mark denial resulting from not overcoming citations or registrability objections for about 10 years.