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Generally, when faced with competitor's illegal copying of a product's package, unless the design of such package is a registered design patent or a trade mark, the claimant used to rely on Article 22 of Taiwan's Fair Trade Act to seek injunctive relief. However, under the Fair Trade Act, there will be a heavy burden on the claimant to show to the judge that the asserted package is a "famous representation" that is "commonly known to the general public". Thus, if the design of a product package is eligible for copyright protection, it would be another powerful tool to combat copycats and free riders.

In accordance with Article 4bis (1) of the Protocol Relating to the Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks, a national registration can be replaced by its posterior international trade mark registration. This provision concerns the situation where a trade mark that is subject of a national registration is also subject of an international registration designating the same country and applies when both registrations stand in the name of the same person and cover identical goods or services.

Both parties in this case produce and commercialise ticket and entry systems for skiing areas, stadiums and similar establishments and have the same customer circles. The plaintiff additionally runs server installations for internet use by its customers, who use its systems to store clients' data. This data is protected by a login requiring a username and password. The data can be read in the form of reports, for example concerning names and addresses of buyers of tickets. The same is possible on a server of a larger customer on which the plaintiff runs that application for the customer. These reports were routinely stored on caches as intermediate storage media.

Africa is highly attractive to counterfeiters. But, explains Chris Walters, several governments in the continent have recently taken action to tackle the problem

The Supreme Court of Thailand recently reaffirmed the test for distinctiveness in regard to trade marks, in a positive decision that will hopefully provide brand owners with better prospects for successfully arguing before the Thai Trade Marks Office and Appeal Board that their distinctive word marks should be registrable.

Trade mark registrations sometimes take turns which would not be expected in the normal run of things. The trade mark owner usually registers his trade mark to sell his goods, promote his services, etc. Sometimes the infrastructure is not ready and the trade mark is not used for some time. In order that the trade mark owner should not be too relaxed there is a pike in the lake to keep all trade mark owners awake. The pike in this context is the law which allows three years of carefree existence of a trade mark.

On December 26 2016, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) issued the first draft of China's first Ecommerce Law, with an invitation for public comment within 30 days.

The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) announced last month that the fees for patent search and examination reports and for trade mark applications will be reduced effective April 1 2017.

In a first for Australia, our courts have ordered ISPs to block the websites of a number of torrenting sites. In Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Ltd [2016] FCA 1503, Justice Nicholas ordered a collection of ISPs to block the websites of a number of well-known bittorrenting sites. The sites included in the blocking order are The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and SolarMovie.

In Opke Ireland Global Holdings Ltd v European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) the General Court (case T-88/16) upheld the Board of Appeal´s decision (case R 2387/2014-5) finding likelihood of confusion between pharmaceutical marks in class 5 according to Article 8 (1) (b) European Union Trade Mark Regulation 207/2009 (EUTMR), namely between the attacked EU mark application, word Alpharen, and the older national Lithuanian and Latvian trade marks, word Alpha D 3. In doing so, the Court had the opportunity to also deal with some procedural regulation rules not which are not commonly adjudicated on.