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United States district courts have reached different conclusions as to the effect of foreign patent proceedings on US patent litigation.

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?

The Australian Full Federal Court in Pinefair P/L v Bedford Industries Rehabilitation Association Inc has found that a patent´ s product claim may be infringed by a product that came into existence as part of a manufacturing process. The patent related to a garden edging product consisting of halved pine logs with an elongated band affixed along a flat rear face of the logs to hold the logs together. Pinefair´ s alleged infringing product connected the logs with an extruded plastic strip during manufacture, but sought to avoid the patent by the additional step of cutting the plastic strip at each log, so that the final product did not have the elongated band connected to each element.

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

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.

According to EC Directives on Telecommunications, member states are obliged to adapt tariffs towards real costs. In Spain, the compliance with these Directives implies the reduction of tariffs for long distance calls (both national and international), and the increase of tariffs for local calls and of the initial access quote. According to Telefónica, the increase of the initial access quote is necessary in order to finance the so-called initial access deficit (which is the difference between the amount obtained by Telefónica for the installation of a line, and the amount that it really costs) that it has to endure at the present time. Although the Spanish government adopted measures for tariff re-balancing in the month of August (by means of increasing urban calls and the initial access quote), Telefónica considered that this increase was not sufficient in order to cover the real costs and claimed new increases, which the government opposed because of their impact on the inflation rate. This attitude has motivated the complaint filed before the European Commission, who has established the deadline for the Spanish government to file its allegations on February 11.

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