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ICANN weathered bipartisan criticism today at a US House of Representatives hearing of its proposal for a potentially unlimited new number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs)

Managing IP’s 2011 awards dinners took place last month in Washington DC and London, and included nearly 100 awards presented to law firms and individuals across 42 countries

The dispute between German wind turbine maker Enercon and its Indian subsidiary has shown that a little known part of India’s Patent Act could have a devastating effect on foreign patent owners

US IP Tsar Victoria Espinel signalled a more aggressive approach to overseas enforcement in a speech at the Fordham IP Conference in New York on Friday

Recent patent changes at the Australian Patent Office have attempted to restrict applicants filing patents for business method patents.

Memantine, a drug developed by Merz back in the 1960s, had been on the market in Germany even before September 1 1976, when it was authorised on the basis of Article 3(7) of the AMG 1976 on the basis of transitional arrangements, provided for under the national legislation transposing Directive 65/65, which exempted medicinal products already on the market from the application of the Community authorisation procedure for a period of 12 years. This old German transitional authorisation expired on January 1 1990, although Merz remained on the German market until July 9 2002.

The use of internet publications in legal affairs is surrounded by serious concerns as to their reliability, in particular about their date of availability. Even if an earlier date may be retrieved for a particular internet page, it remains uncertain whether the retrieved page is faithful as to what was actually available at the older date.

In Ferrero SpA v Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) (March 24 2011), the Court of Justice of the EU (CJ) has upheld the finding of the General Court that the word mark Kinder and the figurative mark TiMi Kinderjoghurt were not similar.

As reported in previous briefing articles, the EU's Competitiveness Council reached an agreement on the basic principles of a unitary EU patent and the establishment of a European and European Union Patent Court (EEUPC) in December 2009. However, the EEUPC suffered a major setback by a ruling of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJ) dated March 8 2011, according to which the establishment of the EEUPC would be incompatible with EU law.

In Group LFE v Swartland Winery, the Supreme Court of Appeal in South Africa has ruled, in essence, that a trade mark can still be a trade mark even if it is also a descriptive geographical indicator.