Search results for

Patent registration is becoming increasingly standardised through international treaties and systems. Yet Africa still retains some historical patent anomalies. Some of these present interesting opportunities.

When conducting a trade mark availability search, we often recommend adding visual elements in order to avoid a possible likelihood of confusion with prior trade marks.

According to a news release of the EPO issued in mid-January, the "comprehensive reforms undertaken at the EPO in recent years have translated into unprecedented increases in the performance of the Office, with significant improvements in productivity, timeliness and quality in 2015". According to the EPO, its 4,200 examiners accomplished a performance increase of 14% compared to 2014. Some 68,400 European patents were granted in 2015, compared to 64,600 in 2014. The proportion of applications being granted amounted to approximately 48%. Over 85% of European first filing applications received a search report within six months from filing.

Bad faith filings by registry pirates in China continue to pose enormous challenges to brand owners, large and small, foreign and domestic.

Back in April 2015 we reported that one of the China antimonopoly agencies (SAIC) published the IP Misuse Rules, which became effective then. What followed after that surprised everyone. The other anti-monopoly agency (National Development and Reform Commission, NDRC), which was at the centre of the attention of the global IP/antitrust community for last couple of years due to its investigation into Qualcomm and InterDigital in China, announced in the summer that it was asked by the State Council to draft guidelines on IP misuse. NDRC issued a preliminary draft in October 2015 and issued an updated version in January.

After Thailand's Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) recently announced that it would abolish the recordation system for well-known trade marks, many questions about the status of well-known marks remained unanswered. This article will discuss whether well-known marks are still protected in Thailand, who has authority to determine whether a mark is well known, and whether a similar recordation system will be reestablished in the future.

On December 8 2015, the Supreme Court, in a decision in four consolidated cases (GR Nos 209271, 209276, 209301 and 209430) permanently enjoined the field testing for Bt talong (genetically modified eggplant), declared the Department of Agriculture Administrative Order No 08, series of 2002 (DAO 08) as null and void, and temporarily enjoined any application for contained use, field testing, propagation, commercialisation, and importation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) until a new administrative order is promulgated in accordance with the law.

A new collective agreement on employee inventions, negotiated between two major parties of the Swedish labour market, the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv) and the Council for Negotiation and Cooperation (PTK – being a body of 25 trade unions), has recently entered into force in Sweden. The new agreement, commonly known as The Inventor Agreement, applies to employee inventions reported to the employer as of December 1 2015.

The Athens Single Member Court of First Instance recently granted a preliminary injunction based on a patent despite the fact that the Opposition Division of the EPO, a few days before the preliminary injunction hearing, had revoked the same patent.

Cloud services make storing and accessing large amounts of information easier and cheaper. This gives in-house IP counsel the perfect opportunity to refresh their trade secrets strategy, argue Mark Ridgway and Annsley Merelle Ward