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The EU Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court are set to launch within the next 18 months. In the first article of a year-long series, Emma Barraclough and James Nurton gauge the expectations and concerns of in-house counsel

The reissue of music and even groups that were hits in the past is becoming more and more common. One practice is for an artist to build a new career leveraging the former group’s name but, as Marianna Furtado de Mendonça discusses, this can raise problems

The annual PCT Survey shows the strongest growth in the world’s emerging markets - China and Brazil among others, as well as a strong showing from the United States

China's legislature passed a bill on August 31 to establish specialised IP courts in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Under the bill, the new courts will:

If it can be established in opposition proceedings that a granted European patent contains subject-matter that extends beyond the content of the application as filed within the meaning of Article 123(2) EPC, the patent cannot be retrospectively amended by deleting that subject-matter from the claims, if such amendment(s) would extend the scope of protection conferred by the patent. This creates an inescapable trap in EPO practice that would, apart from a few exceptional cases, render a European patent containing such a limiting amendment open to revocation.

This year, the Indonesian government enacted new Government Regulation 45 Year 2014 on July 3 (PP number 45/2014), replacing the former Government Regulation 38 Year 2009 (PP number 38/2009) on types and rates of non-tax state revenue applicable to the Ministry of Law and Human Rights in which official fees for trade mark prosecution are regulated. PP number 45/2014 regulates the new tariff for filing trade mark applications, which is increased from Rp600,000 ($50) to Rp1 million.

In several cases, a trade mark cannot be registered, even when it has sufficient distinctiveness. For example, Section 3 (d) of the Trade Mark Law prohibits the registration of "those marks that are susceptible of inducing error with respect to the nature, properties, virtues, quality, manufacturing techniques, function, origin, price or other characteristics of the products or services to be distinguished".

Under the provisions of previous Greek Trade Mark Law No 2239/1994, the recordal of a licence agreement with the Trade Marks Registry was compulsory and a decision of the Trade Marks Administrative Commission on the acceptance of such an agreement was required.

A recent decision of the Appeal Committee of the Romanian Trade Mark Office accepted the registration of the standalone word mark De Obicei (the Romanian for "ususally") for tobacco products in class 34.

Big data is here to stay, but what does it mean for IP? Todd Vare and Michael Mattioli look at how big data can be protected in the US, and ask whether it can thrive under the existing legal framework