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US litigation is expensive and time-consuming, while USPTO reexamination provides limited involvement and grounds of attack for challengers. John Isacson explores proposed new legislation that promises to offer greater opportunities to patent challengers in the USPTO

Stéphanie Bodoni, London

Many companies have decided to become more open about the need to tackle counterfeiting and piracy, prompting international cooperation in the fight against the copiers. Introducing a series of articles looking at trends in counterfeiting, James Nurton reports from the MARQUES conference in Prague

Brands have become some of companies' most valuable assets. With increasingly more companies waking up to that fact, the pressure is on trade mark advisers to find the best protection and enforcement strategies. Darren Olivier and John Olsen of Field Fisher Waterhouse explain

Enquiries into alleged corruption in Hong Kong have cast light on the hidden role of IP investigators in the fight against counterfeiting. Emma Barraclough reports

Emma Barraclough, Hong Kong

MIP received the following letter from US patent owner Vergil L Daughtery, III, in reaction to Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner's article on 'How to fix the US patent system', in the May 2005 issue

Rule 126 of the Philippine Rules of Court says that a search warrant cannot be issued except upon probable cause. In the case of Sony Music Entertainment (Phils), et al v Hon. Judge Dolores Español et al (G.R. No 156804, March 14 2005), Sony learned this rule the hard way.

In view of the high priority the Malaysian government gives to intellectual property, the Malaysian Intellectual Property Corporation (MyIPO) has undertaken the task of speeding up patent registration in the country. As of last year, at least 33,000 patent applications had been filed with MyIPO and that figure is expected to rise sharply. In view of this huge growth and the impending backlog of applications, the Minister of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs has announced that MyIPO will hire between 42 and 100 external examiners to help it assess and examine patent applications. These external examiners will come from various technical organizations, including the Standards and Industrial Research Institute (SIRIM). In addition to being a source of external examiners, SIRIM is also training an additional 500 patent examiners who will eventually be recruited by MyIPO to assist in expediting the registration process.

As reported in the April issue of MIP, the implementation of the so-called biotech directive (EU directive 98/44/EC) into the German Patent Act (GPA) has become effective. This implementation, however, does not only affect material patent law with respect to biotechnological inventions, but also led to a change of §24 GPA regulating the requirements of compulsory licences.