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The Internet has been created and has developed without specific regulations and its creators maintain that its absolute anarchy is an essential condition for its existence. In the absence of regulations, the Internet is regarded as a conquest territory and it frequently happens that the entrepreneurs find out that their trade marks have been registered as domain names by third parties, competitors and non-competitors.

Moves, Deals, Developments

On January 26 this year, the public prosecutor of the City of Örebro, Sweden, Göran Edlund, ordered a search of a storeroom in an abandoned shoe-factory, in order to find evidence of tax evasion. No documents proving tax evasion were found during the search. Instead, the police found approximately 100,000 tee-shirts and sweatshirts printed with a variety of famous trade marks and brands. The garments were probably intended for sale at fairs and markets in Sweden during the coming summer.

Franchising is one of the most effective means of exploiting intellectual property. As in any exploitation of intellectual property, an infrastructure that enables successful protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights is crucial. Singapore and Malaysia both afford a strong intellectual property regime and are ideal for franchises to thrive. However, the franchising concept involves more than just protection of intellectual property rights. There are other important issues that must be considered, in particular, an environment that nurtures the franchise industry and the relationship between franchisor, franchisee and third parties. Singapore, or more specifically, the Singapore Trade Development Board (TDB), is focusing on nurturing the franchise industry in Singapore. It hopes to achieve at least 200 home-grown franchises and 165 foreign franchises by the year 2005. The blueprint includes the following new initiatives:

In January this year Estonia adopted several amendments to the laws regulating the protection of intellectual property and in particular the sanctions for the infringement of intellectual property rights. The amendments had been due to the need both to solve the problems arising during the implementation of these laws thus far and harmonizing the laws with EC Directives in this field. All the amendments are designed to make the fight against pirated and counterfeit goods more effective and in this way to prevent any further distribution of counterfeit goods in Estonia.

In the April 1998 issue of MIP we presented comments about the development of IP rights for the first five years of the existence of the Czech Industrial Property Office. 1998 figures show a continuity in all fields of IP rights. The number of new patent applications is still increasing, utility models and designs are more or less steady and trade mark applications are slowly decreasing. What is quite important from the internal point of view is the fact that for the first time not only since 1993, but since 1990, the number of domestic applicants went up slightly. Figures showing the number of trade mark registrations prove that the backlog from previous years has already been overcome. When comparing the number of filings with the number of registrations, it can be clearly seen that registrations more or less correspond to filings as we must bear in mind that some applications do not mature into registrations due to objections both from the part of the Office and from third parties.

Why is it that so many Community Trade Mark applications are being filed in the Dutch language? Are Dutch enterprises more aware of the need for trade mark protection than companies in other countries? A closer look to the nationality of the applicants of those Dutch trade marks, however, reveals that many of them have no connection whatsoever with the Netherlands. Why then is the Dutch language so popular as a filing language?

A marketing war between rival vacuum cleaner brands is being dragged through courts across Europe, testing the limits of comparative advertising.

Industry organizations in the United States have begun to file submissions to the US Trade Representative as part of the annual Special 301 review.

A new law (No 334/December 31 1998) granting patent protection in Romania for new plant varieties is to enter into force on April 1 1999. From that date, the previous regulations regarding the protection of plant varieties, as stipulated in the Romanian Patent Law 64/1991, will be repealed. Furthermore, the new law enunciates that patent applications filed according to the Patent Law 64/1991, having as subject matter a new plant variety or hybrid, and for which no Notice of Allowance or Rejection will have been issued by April 1 1999, will be solved (finalized) in accordance with the new law 334/1998.