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Tish Berard, the new president of the International Trademark Association, discusses the association’s plans for 2018 in an interview with Ellie Mertens

A decree has changed the rules for intellectual property in Argentina, quite drastically in some instances. Iris V Quadrio, Martín Bensadon and Iván A Poli analyse the most important modifications

A non-use court action is routine for the IP court. Every year several hundred cases are considered and granted. Sometimes, however, a cancellation action stumbles at unexpected obstacles.

In recent decisions, two different single judges of the Delhi High Court, while adjudicating trade mark infringement and/or passing off cases involving online transactions, interpreted Section 20(c) of the Code of Civil Procedure 1908. The judges asserted that every suit should be brought in a court in whose jurisdiction the cause of action, wholly or in part, arises. They also reiterated that the court will have territorial jurisdiction to decide on such cases only where the plaintiff is able to establish that the defendant has entered into a commercial transaction using a website with a user within the forum state. This must have resulted in injury or harm to the plaintiff within the forum state.

In Teksystems v Teksavvy Solutions, the US District Court for the District of Maryland addressed the issue of whether a party's threat to initiate a cancellation action against a trade mark registration before the US Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) was sufficient to create a case or controversy which provides a basis upon which a party may seek a declaratory judgment concerning the validity of a mark.

In the chemical and biotech sector, China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and courts have been extremely strict when it comes to accepting supplementation of post-filing data during prosecution, invalidation or administrative litigation proceedings. The amended Patent Examination Guideline, which took effect on April 1 2017 seemed to provide some principles for the data supplementation issue. According to this, experimental data submitted after the filing date shall be analysed by the examiners. The technical effects to be testified by the supplemented experimental data should be such that a person skilled in the art can derive from the disclosure of the patent application. However, from such wording, it is still unclear to the applicant or patentee what the technical effect derivable from the disclosure of the patent application means exactly.

In its recent decision X ZR 55/16 – Trommeleinheit, the German Federal Court of Justice (FCJ) further clarifies previous case law on the exhaustion of patent rights.

In Nigeria there were two important trade mark judgments, both of which went in favour of foreign companies. In the case of Piaggio & CSPA v Autobahn Techniques and the Registrar of Trademarks (Federal High Court, Lagos, November 30 2017) the court made it clear that a Nigerian distributor cannot take the trade mark of its foreign principal. The judge sent this warning to Nigerian distributors: extensive promotion does not amount to 'acquisition of proprietorship and goodwill.'

Identification and quantification of HER2/neu as a proto-oncogene has led to humoral or antibody-based passive immunotherapy, including the use of trastuzumab (Herceptin®).

Clients are struggling to ban infringing goods from the internet, we experience difficulties making payments because our bank is under a Distributed Denial of Service attack and we frequently receive phishing mails and spam. Despite this, Pirate Bay and illegal streaming can be tempting (even to IP professionals).