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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.

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.

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.

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.

Genentech, the plaintiff, is the patentee of a patent for an invention titled "vascular endothelial cell growth factor antagonists". Genentech filed an application for the registration of patent term extension in relation to the patent asserting that Genentech obtained an approval of partial changes in manufacturing approval (the disposition), which added a new dosage and administration of its medicine Avastin, whose general name is bevacizumab (the medicine). Regarding the medicine, there was a prior disposition that differs only in dosage and administration (see figure for the differences between the prior disposition and the disposition).

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.

Since April 2013, Singapore has been developing itself as a Global IP Hub in Asia that services the needs of IP companies and facilitates the development and growth of the IP landscape in Asia. As part of its efforts to become a conducive environment for IP activities, various initiatives and programmes have been launched to develop Singapore's IP infrastructure, expertise and ecosystem. These include: