Enforcement

The Doha Round represents the latest series of trade negotiations among WTO members, officially launched at the WTO's Fourth Ministerial Conference in Qatar in 2001. Its goal is to substantially reform the global trade system by reducing trade barriers and revising rules across approximately 20 trade-related areas, including intellectual property matters such as rights protection, affordable access to medicines, flexibility within the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement, the promotion of technology transfer, and more.

1. Introduction

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence has sparked significant changes across various sectors, including in the field of patent law. The ability of AI systems to develop new creations poses unique and challenging questions to the conventional structures of IP law. This article explores the implications of AI inventorship within the specific context of South African IP law, shedding light on the legal ambiguities and offering recommendations for future policy adaptations.

Second and last day of the 2023 Europol Intellectual Property (IP) Crime Conference, held at the Ramada by Wyndham Hotel in Lisbon. This conference is a collaborative effort between the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), the Portuguese Economic and Food Safety Authority (ASAE), and the Portuguese Public Security Police (PSP) and focus on combating counterfeit goods, which present significant risks to health, safety, and the environment, alongside with the role of advanced technology in the fight against intellectual property (IP) crime.

The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) was signed on March 21, 2018, at Kigali, Rwanda, where 44 out of 55 African Union member states appended their assent to a landmark treaty.

Inventa contributed to this latest edition, providing an overview of trademark legislation and regulations in Portugal, including requirements, timelines, oppositions and other related rights.

ChatGPT is not just a mere bot with premade phrases that, after 3 or so interactions, send us to a human assistant. ChatGPT is an improved model of language processing based on machine learning systems. It can continuously learn based on the context that users provide.

The Inventa IP Review magazine highlights some of the IP news of the previous year, written by our team, through opinion articles, interviews or press releases. We cover relevant topics that have marked the field of innovation, trademarks, patents or intellectual property rights, mainly in Europe, Africa and Asia.

The 2022 edition shares useful information on the protection of trademarks in different jurisdictions, the entry into the Unitary Patent system and also the impact that may arise from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in the IP field.

In simple terms, a counterfeit is a product that imitates the genuine one and constitutes an infringement of IP rights. This vice is a global concern that denies IP owners their deserved benefits, the result of their resilience, innovation, and financial effort.

Due to its geographical position, bordering Somalia, Uganda, and Tanzania, and its proximity to the Asian sea, Kenya may be deemed as an appealing key distribution point for counterfeit products.

To understand how trade dresses are being safeguarded in Europe, we need to answer the question, what is “trade dress”?

We can define trade dress as a set of characteristics – not only visual, but also sensorial – that allow a consumer to distinguish a particular product or service from the others that coexist in the market. These characteristics can include the way some products are displayed in a store, furniture patterns, ambient music, a smell and so on. Also, a particular packing or product shape can be understood as a trade dress.

On November 29, the Parliament of East Timor approved the country's first Code of Copyright and Related Rights, intended to protect the creation, production and commercialization of literary, scientific and artistic works and their respective authors.

This law, which will come into force 180 days after its publication, proves to be an essential regulatory basis for the recognition of national innovation and culture, rewarding its authors and thus stimulating the creation of new intellectual assets in the most diverse areas of expression.