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The landscape for IP litigation has improved considerably in Canada. Kevin P Siu and Steven B Garland of Smart & Biggar outline the benefits for global rights owners

Trade mark owners need to weigh up various factors when deciding where to bring an infringement action. Sahira Khwaja, Alastair Shaw, Leopold von Gerlach, Ewa Kacperek, Marie-Aimée de Dampierre and Alexis Valot compare procedures and practices in France, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom

In the case of Hewlett-Packard v Digital Revolution (Court of Appeal, The Hague, May 23 2017) a fair number of claims of the patent (EP 2170617) were held to be invalid on the basis of the interpretation of the means-plus-function claims. The appeal court endorsed the interpretation that was used by the EPO Board of Appeal in case T 0096/12.

Last year (2016), the criminal system in force in Mexico until then was changed. A new accusatory oral system was implemented, which represents changes in both the system and the criteria.

Six years after its second edition of the WIPO Overview of WIPO Panel Views on Selected UDRP Questions, WIPO unveiled the third edition of its overview of UDRP jurisprudence. Justin Chay and Brian Beckham highlight several key updates

Tim Moss took over as chief executive of the UK IPO on May 1. Three months on, he talked to James Nurton about his ambitions, Brexit and being an “honest broker”

Online shopping is very popular in China due to the great variety of products and cheap or even free product delivery. As a tactical choice, some IP owners begin to purchase infringing products online and have the process of product delivery notarised. In this way, the plaintiffs attempt to bring lawsuits in a venue having jurisdiction over the place where the delivered product is received or the place where they reside, so as to gain home court advantage or win a favourable edge over the defendants. However, this could cause unfairness and inconvenience to the defendants.

Practitioners have welcomed Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) amendments to the patent regime to spur innovation and improve the quality of patents granted

Concentration, also known as Match Match, Memory, Pelmanism, Shinkei-suijaku, Pexeso or simply Pairs, is a card game in which all cards are laid face down on a surface and two cards are flipped face up over each turn. On May 23 2017 the Court of Appeal in Amsterdam took a decision on Memory, not with regard to the game itself but regarding the Benelux trade mark Memory of Ravensburger BV. Ravensburger appealed against a decision of the Amsterdam Court at first instance to the effect that a third party could use the word "memory" for online games (with the object to turn over pairs of matching cards). The Amsterdam court was of the opinion that "memory" was used in a descriptive manner so that trade mark infringement was out of the question.

After the new Trademark Law came into effect on May 1 2015, the China Trademark Office (CTMO) started to accept multi-class trade mark applications. Unfortunately, voluntary divisional application and partial assignment, which are common in other multi-class trade mark jurisdictions, are not yet available in China. This deficiency may cause dilemmas from time to time in practice.