On July 2, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a memorandum aimed squarely at expert testimony in PTAB proceedings. The immediate point is not that AI tools are forbidden. It is that expert declarations containing claim charts, technical comparisons, infringement-style mappings, or data extrapolations assisted by large language models and similar tools must now be accompanied by a sworn statement of independent verification.The memorandum matters because it reframes AI use as an evidentiary reliability issue, not merely a drafting issue. If the extent of AI involvement is not...
On June 26, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) publicly warned businesses against a UK-linked outfit calling itself “Crown Mark”. The pitch was familiar in one sense and more sophisticated in another: a third party was supposedly about to file the recipient’s brand, and only urgent paid action could stop the damage. IPOPHL said it has no official relationship with that entity at all.At almost the same moment, a second signal from the Philippines became harder to ignore. IPOPHL has been pressing for updates to the IP Code and related rules as technology changes...
Debate over AI and copyright in the UK has flared up again in late June 2026, but the real significance lies in two policy signals that are harder to ignore. In its March 2026 report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, the government stepped back from its earlier preference for a commercial text and data mining exception built around rights reservation and transparency. At the same time, it signalled that the UK’s special copyright protection for wholly computer-generated works may no longer deserve to survive.This is not final legislation. It is, however, a serious change in policy...
On 2 July, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) moved a practical question to the centre of design filing strategy: when an applicant submits visuals produced with generative AI, can it still show that a human being meaningfully shaped the final design? For applicants relying heavily on outputs from tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, that question is no longer theoretical. It now goes directly to filing resilience.The new guidance does not shut the door on AI-assisted design work. What it does is draw a firmer line around applications that look like “prompt in, image...
On 8 July 2026, during WIPO’s 68th series of meetings of the Assemblies, Tanzania’s Deputy Permanent Representative in Geneva, Ambassador Hoyce Temu, spoke in the country’s national capacity and aligned Tanzania with statements delivered by South Africa for the African Group and Nepal for the Least Developed Countries Group. Tanzania called for a more inclusive, balanced and forward-looking intellectual property system, arguing that artificial intelligence could accelerate innovation and economic transformation only if developing economies also gain practical access to capacity building,...
In the Philippines, the latest shift in copyright registration is no longer just a policy update on paper. By the week of 17 June 2026, the market signal had become much clearer in practice: applications now move through IPOPHL’s electronic filing channel, not the old paper-based route, and the registration process is being treated more openly as a substantive screening point rather than a clerical formality.The sharper development is the refusal logic now sitting inside that workflow. Under the revised framework, “lack of human authorship,” originality, and creative expression are squarely...
The EPO’s public guidance is making one point harder to ignore: for AI-assisted inventions, the real issue is no longer whether AI was used, but whether the application clearly ties a claimed technical effect to a reproducible technical solution and identifiable human technical contribution. For filings built on model training, data selection or AI-assisted discovery, that goes directly to patentability, sufficiency and later validity risk.The point many applicants still misread is disclosure. The EPO does not generally require applicants to hand over the specific training dataset. But...
On May 9, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released the pre-publication version of Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training. The report does not endorse either extreme. It does not say all AI training is infringement, and it does not offer a blanket fair use safe harbor. Instead, it pushes the analysis back to the facts that matter: what was copied, how the material was obtained, whether licensing markets exist, and how the use affects rightsholders in practice. For AI companies, that is a meaningful shift. Large-scale scraping is now much harder to frame as a...
Mexico’s third-year declaration of actual and effective use is no longer the kind of maintenance filing that can be treated as an afterthought. For registrations that fall within this regime, the owner must file within the three-month window after the third anniversary and tie the surviving scope of protection to the goods or services that are actually in use. As discussion grows around digital filing, automated checks and the risk of manufactured use materials, this step is starting to look less like a form and more like an evidence test.What can already be verified from public sources is...
Nigerian officials say WIPO Director General Daren Tang will visit from June 1, 2026, with the Abuja office expected to be further positioned and publicly emphasized as WIPO’s first and only office in Sub-Saharan Africa and as a regional hub for the area. Running in parallel is a more operational story: Nigeria is continuing to digitise its trademark, patent and industrial design administration through WIPO’s Industrial Property Automation System (IPAS) and its own online filing environment, pushing a registry long associated with paper files and fragmented processing toward a more...
South Africa’s draft national AI policy did not unravel because of a minor editorial slip. It was pulled because a policy meant to promote trustworthy AI was found to contain fictitious academic references, apparently generated without proper verification. The draft had been published for public comment on 10 April, was withdrawn by Minister Solly Malatsi on 26 April, and by 26 May the government was already promising a rewritten text through an independent expert panel, with fresh public consultation now targeted for January 2027.That timeline matters well beyond South Africa. For legal...
On March 20, 2026, the White House released its National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence legislative recommendations, and the section on intellectual property immediately stood out. The document states that the Administration believes training AI models on copyrighted material does not violate U.S. copyright law, while also acknowledging contrary arguments and urging Congress not to interfere with the courts’ resolution of whether such training qualifies as fair use.
The framework is notable not only for its pro-innovation tone, but also for the second track it opens. Rather...
The UK Intellectual Property Office’s 2026–27 Corporate Plan places service transformation and AI copyright policy among its main delivery priorities. The official publication record shows that the plan was first published on 11 May 2026. With the patent side of One IPO moving into optimisation and legacy-system retirement, UKIPO plans to begin designing the trade mark service on the same shared technology base. It also acknowledges operational pressure: rising trade mark volumes have created backlogs in hearings and tribunals, while patent workloads remain affected by application growth...
“Just AI” is resurfacing in African IP debates not because it makes for a neat slogan, but because the policy direction is becoming harder to ignore. After the African Union adopted its Continental AI Strategy in 2024, high-level policy dialogue in 2025 continued to urge African states to develop AI laws, regulations and national frameworks suited to their own conditions. AI governance on the continent is moving from principle to institutional design.That shift has pushed two older disputes back into view. One is South Africa’s earlier acceptance of a patent application naming DABUS as...
The U.S. Copyright Office is pushing AI use in creative work out of the realm of vague disclosure and into something far more structured. Under its updated registration approach, applicants are expected to draw a clearer line between the parts of a work authored by a human and the parts generated by AI, whether the material is text, images, audio, or a mixed-format output.The practical importance goes well beyond one more compliance step. Since 2023, the Office has required applicants to disclose more than a de minimis amount of AI-generated material and to describe the human author’s...
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued an interim assessment on digital platform copyright governance and AI infringement liability, placing social media services, content-sharing platforms and built-in generative AI tools within the same policy conversation. The report’s immediate focus is not whether AI-generated content is useful, but whether automated AI systems used for DMCA notice-and-takedown can deal fairly with mistaken removals, under-removal and counter-notice procedures.The more difficult issue is the platform’s changing role. The traditional safe-harbour model rests on a familiar...
The German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) has put digital technologies back at the centre of the patent debate. Its recent trend analysis shows continued growth in patent applications linked to digital key technologies, with particularly visible movement in computer technology, audiovisual technology and related fields. Within those categories, generative AI, machine learning, virtual modelling and industrial digital twins are becoming harder to separate from one another.The point is not simply that more AI-related applications are being filed. The more practical issue is that DPMA’s...
The 2026 edition of the EPO Guidelines for Examination has been in force since 1 April. By May, the new text is no longer a future reference point; it is now shaping drafting, prosecution timing and responses to examination communications. For European patent applicants, the practical impact is concentrated in a few areas: responsibility for AI-assisted drafting, the end of accelerated search under PACE, the novelty effect of product disclosures, and the way claims are interpreted in light of the description and drawings.These changes matter at the level of filing decisions. Using AI tools...
During the INTA Annual Meeting held from 2 to 6 May, WIPO presented a new digital management environment, with eMadrid placed at the centre of a more guided filing experience. The upgraded environment is expected to support smarter classification suggestions and automated risk searches, giving applicants an earlier warning when goods and services descriptions may trigger provisional refusals in designated Madrid members.The practical message is plain: a cleaner filing record is becoming part of the applicant’s own responsibility, not just an issue for later examination. Companies using the...
South Korea’s latest IP moves are easier to understand together than apart. On 25 June, MOIP outlined its IP-AX coordination framework, signalling that AI-assisted invention, AI-enabled examination and related policy adjustments will be handled in a more integrated way. On 3 July, MOIP then publicised a four-party cooperation arrangement with MFDS, the Korea Customs Service and the Korea Cosmetic Association aimed at tightening the response to counterfeit cosmetics moving through cross-border channels and online platforms.Read separately, one story looks like patent governance and the other...
