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...

In early May, the Vietnamese government stepped up its explanation and implementation messaging around Decree No. 134/2026/ND-CP, which took effect on 9 April 2026. The decree amends Decree No. 17/2023/ND-CP and gives more detailed treatment to AI-assisted creation, the use of protected text and data for AI training, rights-reservation mechanisms, and the responsibilities of intermediary services and digital content platforms. For generative AI providers, content platforms and businesses using AI-generated material, the compliance question is moving beyond a simple AI label.The practical...

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,...

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...

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 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...

During the 68th WIPO Assemblies, Vietnam’s Minister of Science and Technology, Vu Hai Quan, described intellectual property as a cornerstone of the knowledge economy. Nguyen Hoang Giang, Deputy Director General of the Intellectual Property Office of Vietnam, added that the country is accelerating IP commercialisation and preparing a legislative plan for a new Copyright Law. Vietnam’s latest IP action plan also points to stronger enforcement, new rules for AI and data, shorter examination timelines and the use of IP assets as collateral for lending.The policy mix is broader than a...

On 10 March 2026, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on copyright and generative AI that sends a clear policy signal to the Commission and the market: if a generative AI service operates in or targets the EU, it should not be able to evade EU copyright rules simply because model training took place outside the Union. The resolution argues for a more enforceable connection between transparency duties, rightsholder reservations and practical enforcement, so that non-compliant providers do not gain a structural advantage over compliant competitors. What makes the text especially...

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...

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...

“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...

With the April 2026 EPO Guidelines now in force, practitioners this week have been focusing on three changes with immediate drafting and prosecution relevance. First, the EPO has formally integrated colour and greyscale drawings into practice for electronic filings, moving beyond the old black-and-white-only baseline. Second, the Guidelines make clear that applicants and representatives remain fully responsible for everything filed with the EPO, even where patent applications or replies have been prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Third, the revised text now reflects...

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...

Following the weekend maintenance on 23 May, the EPO’s digital direction is easier to read than before. Public materials do not present every change as one single product launch, but the pattern is now clear: MyEPO is being reinforced as the operational hub for file access and online interaction, AI-supported classification is being extended behind the scenes, and AI-assisted minuting in oral proceedings is moving beyond pilot use.This is not just another interface refresh. For applicants and representatives, the more important point is that the EPO is steadily connecting filing, online...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...