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Latin America has placed its foot firmly forward in defining the new frontiers of what can be registered as a trade mark. Ingrid Hering reports

Persistent actions on the part of the Singapore police through the Intellectual Property Rights Branch have been extremely successful in smashing syndicates who have been dealing in pirated articles such as VCDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, etc.

Johannes Ahme A new cost law is under preparation which, besides introducing the conversion to the euro, integrates the regulations regarding all costs and fees of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office and the Federal Patent Court into a single cost act. Thus, essentially all the rules regarding payment of fees are removed from the patent act, trade mark act, utility model act, design model act etc and integrated into a single common cost act. The basic rule of this new cost act is that fees for an application, a request, an opposition, or an appeal become due at the moment they are filed. The Patent Office or Federal Patent Court will start to work on the particular application, request etc only once the fees have been paid. If the fees are not paid within three months after becoming due, the application, request etc is deemed to be withdrawn. The particular fees and their amounts are listed in an attachment to the cost act.

Q Todd Dickinson and Roger L May identify 10 pitfalls that lie in wait for licensees and licensors, and examine how to draft contracts to eliminate them

Interview: James Tierney, Boeing Ingrid Hering speaks to James Tierney, director of IP business, Boeing

Trade mark work in Europe is entering a period of consolidation as applications to OHIM level off. Now, reports James Nurton, Europe’s courts will have to grapple with the complicated issues arising from the Trade Mark Directive

Ralph Cunningham, Hong Kong

While the Czech Republic, Hungary and Russia have all strengthened their IP laws, copyright and trade marks owners have major concerns about the lack of enforcement, reports James Nurton

New trade marks filed in the last few years were quite often identical either with a domain name or with part of one, or with a general part of a website.

More than half a million .info registrations were made within the first 90 days of the new top level domain name's operation. By comparison, it took the global .com domain more than five years to reach the same level, according to a University of California Berkeley study quoted by the .info registry Afilias.