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In Mexico when someone seeks protection for a title of a periodical publication, a Mexican intellectual property counsel should recommend obtaining copyright as well as trade mark protection as trade mark protection only will not suffice. The Mexican Copyright Law recognizes sui generis protection for titles of publications including magazines, heads of newspapers, newspapers, pamphlets, supplements and guides. The Law also recognizes other types of titles of publications, however for the purposes of this brief they need not be included.

It is now seven years since the Council of the European Communities adopted Regulation (EEC) No 1768/92 concerning the creation of a supplementary protection certificate for medicinal products, which entered into force on January 2 1993. This Regulation was intended to compensate the patent proprietor for the fact that, because of the long time taken by state marketing authorization procedures for medicinal products, the period of effective protection under the remaining term of the patent after such authorization has been obtained has been reduced considerably. The supplementary protection certificate (SPC) is a property right in its own right, which is granted separately for each member state of the EEC. It does not lead to a general extension of the term of a patent, and the question of the subject matter and extent of protection conferred by SPCs is consequently of decisive importance. Among specialists, this issue is the subject of highly charged debate, and the practice with regard to granting in the various member states also shows that, in some cases, very different standards are applied, with the consequence that, in the United Kingdom for example, certificates can be granted for active agents in a medicinal product in the form of their bases or salts thereof, whereas in Germany the Federal Patent Court (BPatG) has hitherto taken the line that the subject matter of an SPC can only be for the active agent shown in the marketing authorization. In the opinion of the BPatG, only the courts hearing infringement cases are entitled to determine the extent of protection conferred by an SPC, not the German Patent and Trade Mark Office.

In Australian pre-grant patent opposition proceedings, grounds available to the opponent include lack of inventive step. Lack of inventive step is established if it is shown that the invention claimed would have been obvious to a non-inventive skilled worker, equipped with the common general knowledge (CGK) in the field of the invention in Australia at the priority date of the application. CGK is that which is part of the ordinary equipment of all persons engaged in the relevant art. The nature of the CGK must be established by evidence. An appropriate deponent for this purpose is clearly a non-inventive skilled worker in the field of the invention.

Entertainment:

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Internet entrepreneurs beware. Registering a domain name does not give you an automatic right to the equivalent trade mark.

Due to a substantial general increase in IP activity - increasing numbers of national patent applications etc the need for skilled and well-educated personnel in this field has been continuously increasing particularly during the past few years. This goes for the Swedish Patent Office as well as for industry and private IP practitioners. In order to take care of innovations in industry, one of the best ways is to have in-house skilled IP experts who can promote and recognize internal inventive activity.

Silhouette has bestowed on a trade mark owner a parasitic right to interfere with the distribution of goods which bears little or no relationship to the proper function of the trade mark right.

On May 4 1999, a new Act (14/1999) on Taxes and Public Prices for services provided by the Nuclear Security Council was adopted. This Act contains, among other things, the necessary provisions in order to adapt Spanish legislation to the Trade mark Rights Treaty and Regulation, which was ratified by Spain on March 17 1999.

When applicants appeal Korean Industrial Property Tribunal (KIPT) decisions on unpatentability matters to the Korean Patent Court (KPC), they are usually frustrated at the decisions made by the court. Considering that most of judges at the KPC have limited technical background, it is extremely difficult for an appellant to persuade judges to overturn a KIPT decision sustaining the examiner´ s rejection on a patent application by discussing complex technical principles and theories as to why such an invention should be patentable. In other words, judges at the KPC customarily defer the technical aspects of an invention, ie whether an invention is patentable, to the KIPT because the KIPT is comprised of technical experts whose decisions are usually supported with precise and accurate technical reasons.