Thailand

October 31 2020, marked the closing of the public comment period for Thailand's proposed amendments to the Patent Act B.E. 2522 (1979). The Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) had published its latest draft of the amendments on September 30 for the month-long period of public feedback.

COVID-19のパンデミックは、世界中が全く想定外で準備ができていない中起こったことは間違いありません。一部の国、特に東南アジアでは、非常に上手にこの嵐を切り抜けてきた国もありますが、多くの国はまだこの未曾有の現実に直面していたり、健康への影響を否定したりして、人々に犠牲を強いることになっています。一方で経済的な影響について否定する者はおらず、グローバル規模で壊滅的な被害を及ぼしており、いかなる国も経済も影響を受けなかったところはありません。

Kritsana Mingtongkhum and Nathan Wood of Satyapon & Partners look at the growing business of medical mask counterfeiting as a result of COVID-19 and explore the ways in which trademark owners can protect themselves, preferably through registration, or failing that, through recourse to criminal law

With many employees in Thailand working outside their company's normal IT security fence, their increased use of their own computers and devices instead of those in their offices with standard or enhanced security mechanisms has made it more challenging for employers to control access to key business information. In the rush to set up a fully or partially remote workforce, most companies have had little time to establish work-from-home guidelines on protection of their valuable intangible assets like trade secrets and confidential business information. The need for sufficient internal guidelines on copying files to USB drives, emailing files to personal accounts, and uploading to cloud storage is already widely recognised, but who could have imagined the need for rules precluding sharing proprietary information over Zoom, Skype, Webex, and such programs?

Traditional IP enforcement measures are sometimes ill-equipped to deal with the rapidly evolving nature of internet resources in the digital era. Thailand has been responding to the exponential rise of online IP infringement on a rolling basis – most recently in 2017 when it amended the Computer Crime Act (CCA) to give IP owners the option of blocking websites that post IP-infringing content. This is set out in Section 20(3) of the law.