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In the US, trade mark owners typically have two options to prevent the misuse of their marks as part of domain names, namely filing a complaint pursuant to the Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy (UDRP) and seeking relief pursuant to the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA).

According to Article 153 of the Mexican Industrial Property Law, a mark can be cancelled from the register when it has become in trade and for relevant consumers, the usual name of the products or services it was registered for. This referenced provision regulates the case of marks that – by acquiring of fame and the tolerance of its owner – becomes the usual or generic name of a product or service in trade.

The Australian courts and the Australian Patent Office continue to have divergent views on the level of obviousness required to invalidate a patent. Whilst the Patent Office has attempted to move Australia towards the European so-called "problem and solution" approach, the courts highlight deficiencies in it and refuse to adopt the Office's preferred view.

In many countries IP, law affords separate protection to functional and non-functional aspects of a newly developed product. While novelty in function (a new invention) is covered by patent law, newness in aesthetics and other superficial features are protected by design law. However, in Thailand, IP protection for functional and design aspects is not mutually exclusive. Both inventions and designs are protected under the same patent law (Patent Act BE 2522(1979)). Consequently, many companies have ended up applying for design protection even when product changes are purely functional in nature and hence more applicable to invention patents than design patents. Sometimes these cases are driven primarily by concerns relating to cost, time (to bypass the substantive examination of an invention patent) or just plain strategy to monopolise a particular design.

The Director General of the Intellectual Property Office (IPOPHL), Ricardo Blancaflor, drawing on his experiences as former undersecretary of the Department of National Defense, and the Department of Justice where he handled activities involving anti-terrorism, anti-human trafficking, and the task force against political violence, has come out with some novel and less costly ways of assisting trade mark owners to enforce their IP rights in addition to raids, filing actions and border control measures. One of these is obtaining the cooperation of malls or shopping centres where the selling of counterfeits proliferates.

In case T1544/07 one of the opponents filed an appeal against the decision of the EPO Opposition Division to maintain the opposed patent in amended form. This would normally be a situation where the prohibition of reformatio in peius applies. But in this case, the Board of Appeal decided otherwise.

New Decree 119/2010/ND-CP (Decree 119) on amendment of some articles of Decree 105/2006/ND-CP (Decree 105) on protection of IP rights in Vietnam was promulgated by the Vietnam Government on December 30 2010, and becomes effective as of February 20 2011. Decree 105 is one of the most important legal instruments on protection and enforcement of IP rights in Vietnam.

Article 39.3 of TRIPs establishes that test data required as a condition to approve the marketing of pharmaceutical or agricultural chemical products which use new chemical entities, the origination of which involves a considerable effort, shall be protected against unfair commercial use.

Plans to develop a unitary patent system for the European Union have been thwarted by linguistic and legal difficulties. The main objectives of the unitary system are reduction of costs for obtaining and enforcing patents and lifting of legal uncertainties, by creating a unitary patent and a European Patents Court under a Unified Patent Litigation System (UPLS). Currently, European patents have to be validated in each country and are enforced by national law. The high translation costs for validating patents as well as the expensive and often unpredictable litigation outcome in the different member states – sometimes reaching conflicting verdicts in identical cases – have often been cited as major weak points of the system.

J Kitty Huang presents the results of a survey into attitudes to IP management among Taiwanese companies