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Latin America has placed its foot firmly forward in defining the new frontiers of what can be registered as a trade mark. Ingrid Hering reports

In the second part of the annual World IP Survey, James Nurton, Ingrid Hering and Ralph Cunningham analyze the latest trends in trade mark and copyright practice around the world. We also reveal the leading firms in our annual poll

Malcolm Royal, president, International Federation of Intellectual Property Attorneys

Persistent actions on the part of the Singapore police through the Intellectual Property Rights Branch have been extremely successful in smashing syndicates who have been dealing in pirated articles such as VCDs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, etc.

Mexican IP law does not recognize certification marks (marks identifying products or services whose quality meets particular standards) as a different type of mark. Thus, certification marks are usually registered as service marks in international class 42. Such registration may not prevent third parties from registering the same mark in a different class and use it for non-certified products and services, potentially misleading the public, and thus jeopardizing the value of the certification mark. Under the current Mexican Industrial Property Institute (IMPI)'s examination procedures, it is unlikely that the examiner's prima facie analysis in a cross-class examination will lead him to deny registration based on likelihood of confusion between the certification mark and that of the application filed in a totally different class.

On August 22 2001 a new law regarding industrial property protection came into effect in Poland. The main legal act regulating the protection of inventions, utility models, industrial designs, trade marks, geographical indications and topography of integrated circuits is the Law on Industrial Property of June 30 2000 (Law Gazette of 2001 No 49, Item 508). The law introduces a number of important changes in the trade mark registration procedure.

Johannes Ahme A new cost law is under preparation which, besides introducing the conversion to the euro, integrates the regulations regarding all costs and fees of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office and the Federal Patent Court into a single cost act. Thus, essentially all the rules regarding payment of fees are removed from the patent act, trade mark act, utility model act, design model act etc and integrated into a single common cost act. The basic rule of this new cost act is that fees for an application, a request, an opposition, or an appeal become due at the moment they are filed. The Patent Office or Federal Patent Court will start to work on the particular application, request etc only once the fees have been paid. If the fees are not paid within three months after becoming due, the application, request etc is deemed to be withdrawn. The particular fees and their amounts are listed in an attachment to the cost act.

More than half a million .info registrations were made within the first 90 days of the new top level domain name's operation. By comparison, it took the global .com domain more than five years to reach the same level, according to a University of California Berkeley study quoted by the .info registry Afilias.

The European Court of Justice has rejected The Netherlands' bid to annul the directive instructing member states to provide patent protection for biotechnological inventions.

New trade marks filed in the last few years were quite often identical either with a domain name or with part of one, or with a general part of a website.