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A recent Full Federal Court decision in Australia has held that the contributory infringement provisions found in the Patents Act 1990 are effective in relation to method claims.

The Andean Pact Decision 344, applicable in the five countries of the Andean Community (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela) provides in article 1 that the member countries shall grant patents to inventions of either products and/or processes in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, have inventive level, and have an industrial use.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on April 14 2000 handed down a decision that required the Director (prior to March 29 2000, the Commissioner) of the United States Patent and Trademark Office to retract his own earlier refusal to permit a patent applicant to correct, pursuant to PCT Rule 91.1 and 37 CFR 1.183 (a US Patent and Trademark Office rule) an incorrect patent application number contained in a Demand for International Preliminary Examination. This decision, Helfgott & Karas, PC v Dickinson, 54 USP Q2d 1425 (Fed Cir 2000) concludes that the Director "acted arbitrarily and capriciously in dismissing the plaintiff's petition to correct the erroneous Demand for International Preliminary Examination", inter alia, because PCT Rule 91.1 is legally binding on the Director and allows the correction of "obvious errors" in certain PCT filings, including such Demands.

Tacking allows you to secure priority for your US trade marks by citing earlier registrations. But Thomas M Williams warns that recent cases have limited trade mark owners' ability to tack old marks on to new ones

The English High Court's decision in Davidoff caused a major parallel imports stir. David Rose reveals, though, that the Scottish courts have come to a different conclusion in the same dispute

Russia and the other former countries of the Soviet Union are a nightmare for rights owners. Now a group of companies have got together to tackle the problems from the bottom up. James Nurton reports

On May 25 1999, the Russian President issued a Decree on the "Structure of Federal Executive Bodies". That Decree meant a major reshuffle of the governmental bodies responsible for various facets of the functioning of the Russian national economy. The Decree set up or reorganized a number of federal entities and abolished other federal bodies. For the most part, the changes concerned relatively unimportant entities and mostly remained unnoticed.

Brave choices, unpopular decisions

Deals

Tomorrow's biggest industries will all be driven by technology. Robert Stoll, of the USPTO, takes a timely look at the significance of patent law as an engine of economic development and improvements in human life