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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.

With the recent revisions to the PRC Trade Mark Law that took effect on May 1 2014, it's helpful to review some best practices in China trade mark prosecution, particularly in light of changes in TMO practices following the revisions to the law. Trade mark squatting in China remains rampant, and for companies big and small, it often is a matter of time before your brand is pirated. Filing trade mark applications is usually less expensive than filing trade mark oppositions or buying brands from pirates. So it's best to file early, and well before launching a brand in the PRC.

In a recent order, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has fined almost all major car manufacturers in India, for restricting the expansion of the spare parts and independent repairers segment of the economy, at the cost of consumers, service providers and dealers. While similar decisions have previously been issued across the globe, this is the first in India and contains important analyses on the overlap between IP rights and competition law.

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".

Disclosures on the internet may form state of the art before the EPO under Article 54(2) EPC. Internet disclosures are a particularly useful source of information for inventions in telecommunications and computer-implemented inventions. However, internet disclosures have proven difficult to handle, given the ease with which the internet can be updated and changed, and an inherent unreliability around the dates on which information was made available.

Austrian patent law accepts the ownership of patents (and other IP rights) of several natural and/or legal persons as co–owners principally but refers to general civil law all questions concerning the rights of the individual owners with regard to the other co–owners.

Although Community trade marks cover all EU member states and the relevant public consists in the present case of professionals and average European consumers, Spanish ladies were the deciding factor in the OHIM opposition case at issue between a Canadian trade mark applicant and a German opponent.

In recent months, business owners and associations in Malaysia have, via various channels, vented their frustration over the high-handed manner in which a collecting society for performers had been collecting its fees from music users, such as retailers and shopkeepers.