Search results for

Consumers are turning green. Gabriele Engels and Ulrike Grübler discuss what this means for the legal protection of brands, from eco-labelling to the new EU certification mark

Vietnam's IP enforcement system has seen great improvements over the past few years. In particular, the Inspectorate of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has handled many complex disputes in the pharmaceutical sector related to patent infringement, unfair competition and trade mark infringement. Rights holders have generally been quite pleased with the decisions reached by MOST, as well as the expert opinions provided in various cases by the National Office of Intellectual Property (NOIP) and the Vietnam Intellectual Property Research Institute (VIPRI), which are often a precursor to a MOST administrative enforcement action. Nevertheless, with a few tweaks when Vietnam amends its Law on Intellectual Property this year, the system can be improved even further to help better protect IP in the pharma sector. Below are a few suggestions for improvement.

Russian examiners did not favour confectionery. This does not mean that they are diabetics; they simply felt uneasy when an application came seeking protection for a confectionery patent for a utility model. That was application number 2014136036/13. By that time the law had been changed so that the application had to be examined in its substance not only for formal requirements. It was examined and rejected soon after. The applicant appealed against the decision of the examiner. The Board of Appeal of the Patent Office tested (tasted) it for patentability and came to a different conclusion. Why?

In a series of decisions following the CJEU's Huawei Technologies v ZTE judgment (discussed in our article published in October 2016), which is significant with regard to SEP and FRAND, German patent litigation chambers have further clarified their requirements for the conduct of parties to an infringement procedure.

Towards the end of November 2016, the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office rendered its order in decision G 1/15, which brings an end to the phenomenon of so-called self-collision, also nicknamed toxic divisionals and poisonous priorities. On the date of completion of this article, the reasons for the decision have not been made available. The Enlarged Board's order is, however, clear in the sense that applicants no longer have to worry about self-collision.

The Australian Productivity Commission has finalised the release of its lengthy report into the IP system.

A recent decision from the Federal Circuit recognises a privilege between non-attorneys patent-agents and their clients under certain conditions. Philippe Signore reviews the limits of this patent agent privilege, as well as those of the attorney-client privilege, within the context of the discovery phase of a US litigation

Immortalised as a perennial icon of the motoring industry and a prime example of British engineering at its finest, production of the Land Rover Defender finally came to an end in January 2016. Spanning almost 70 years, the Defender had been the longest-running production car in existence.

In Korea, plants can be protected by both Patent Law and Plant Variety Protection Law. Activities to seek the protection of the IP rights pertaining to plants have been growing, particularly with the development of genetic engineering technology as well as with the growth of the agriculture industry. This growing interest is evidenced by the significant increase in the number of applications, not only for patents, but also for plant variety rights. For example, as of December 2015, more than 8,000 applications for plant variety registrations were filed in Korea which makes Korea the seventh most active filer of plant variety rights among the UPOV member countries.

null