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Every week the Managing IP blog rounds up some of the interesting and unusual IP news appearing on the web. Here’s a selection of recent items

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.

Recently, the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) had to decide on the request of a complainant, himself sued for patent infringement, to become a party in an ex parte reinstatement procedure concerning the allegedly infringed patent. After the European patent was maintained in opposition in amended form, the patentee failed to perform the required validation steps in time before the German Patent and Trademark Office (GPTO). Having been informed by the GPTO about the loss of his German patent, the patentee requested reinstatement and simultaneously performed the required validation actions.

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

2015 saw a spate of noteworthy trade mark cases in the Malaysian courts. Geetha Kandiah and Rebecca Chong look at the lessons learned

In Belgium, a patent is automatically granted, meaning the grant procedure does not involve a substantive examination of the application, with the provision that a search report has been issued.

Judges in China have expressed different views regarding whether a court in the place of receipt of goods has jurisdiction in patent infringement cases. Xiaolin Wang and Harlem Lu explain the issues

When an EU trade mark (EUTM, formerly known as CTM) is registered its owner has five years to use it in a sufficiently broad way within the European Union. If he does not exceed his mere local use of his EUTM within this time slot, his EUTM is not only open to cancellation but he can also not derive rights from it to forbid others to use this mark and similar marks. This is what teaches us the following case.

In Philip Morris Brands Sarl v Rothmans Brands Sdn Bhd & Anor, the court held that collating information and gathering insights does not amount to "use" under the Trade Marks Act 1976 (TMA).

There is a positive development in data privacy protection in Indonesia, due to the issuance of a draft Ministerial Regulation on Data Protection (Draft Regulation) by the Ministry of Communications and Informatics of the Republic Indonesia (MOCI). This Draft Regulation was prepared as one of the implementing regulations of Law No 11 of 2008 on Electronic Information and Transactions (EIT Law) and Government Regulation No 82 of 2012 on the Implementation of Electronic Systems and Transactions (GR 82). In October 2015, the government also issued a draft Data Protection Law (Draft Law).