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The SUEPO union representing EPO examiners is staging a march in a protest against the Office's management, and its President Benoit Battistelli, after three staff were disciplined

Nestlé's four-finger chocolate bar is not entitled to trade mark protection, as the company has not shown that it has acquired distinctiveness such that consumers rely upon it to identify the product's origin

Judge John Love of the Eastern District of Texas has recommended granting a Section 101 motion against plaintiff Rothschild Location Technologies, which filed 33 patent cases in the district in 2015

A drop in US trade mark litigation in 2015, a Federal Circuit hearing of an Apple and Samsung dispute, a judge ruling a monkey does not own copyright in a selfie, artist Richard Prince being sued, the copyright of Anne Frank’s diary, and the latest patent news from the hoverboard market were in the IP headlines this week

Austria, like Germany, has had for many decades a dual system for judging patent infringement: infringement itself is the realm of the Commercial Courts (or Penal Courts) while nullity of the underlying patent can only be stated by the Patent Office and its Appellate Courts. Such a nullity decision has then an effect erga omnes which means that the patent is struck out of the registers. That split is mitigated in that the Appeal Courts judging the infringement question are the same as those for the Patent Office decisions and usually decide on nullity prior to their judgment concerning infringement. Only in the proceeding for an interlocutory injunction has the Court to judge nullity of the patent itself as a preliminary question. But very often the patent is upheld in this procedure and the percentage of uncertainty of the Court about it is expressed by the level of security payment imposed on the plaintiff.

The Australian Appeal Court has recently clarified the position of software and business method patents in Australia. In Commissioner of Patents v RPL Central Pty Ltd, the Full Federal Court again aligned Australia with a US-centric position akin to that set out in the Alice Corporation case.

In a recent decision (Kochgefäß [Cooking pan], X ZR 81/13) the Federal Supreme Court (FSC) once again dealt with the requirements of an infringement under the doctrine of equivalence.

Supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) are issued under EU Regulation 469/2009 to compensate for lost patent time because of the pharmaceutical marketing authorisation procedure.

Africa is a haven for counterfeiters. Yet things are changing. With the World Health Organisation estimating that 30% of the pharmaceutical market in Africa is counterfeit, African governments understand that counterfeiting creates public health, fiscal and societal problems. They know that they need to provide effective IP enforcement measures. Such measures now feature prominently in much of the new IP legislation in Africa. We will look at a few countries.

As of January 1 2016, Law 4335/2015 has come into force. This law was passed in the context of structural reforms imposed by Greece's creditors as a condition to the bailout with an objective to accelerate judicial proceedings and includes important amendments to the code of civil procedure.