CNIPA this week issued the Annual Work Guide for the Demonstration Programme on Building China into an IP Powerhouse (2026). The policy signal is fairly direct: assessment should move further towards patent quality and industrialisation, rather than simple filing-count targets. The guide calls for patent quality and patent commercialisation to be emphasised in project reviews, institutional evaluation, enterprise recognition and talent assessment, while avoiding the use of patent numbers as a stand-alone benchmark. For local authorities, parks, universities and demonstration enterprises,...

Jordan’s Cabinet has advanced amendments to the Investment Environment Regulation, with a clear focus on reducing procedural friction for foreign investors entering the market. The changes are expected to simplify business registration and improve the way related checks, including trade names and trademarks, are handled before or during registration. For companies planning a Jordanian entity or brand launch, the practical point is straightforward: name clearance and trademark registrability may need to be assessed earlier in the investment process.A separate but connected filing update is...

UKIPO’s updated April 2026 guidance on non-use revocation, read together with a growing line of Tribunal decisions, is making life harder for proprietors trying to defend registrations with thin evidence. Formally, the latest trade mark-related entry in the published Tribunal Practice Notice list is still TPN 1/2024 from July 2024. In practice, however, the evidential line on genuine use has become more exacting. Platform screenshots, scattered sales records and transaction traces that do not land clearly on UK consumers are becoming much less persuasive when standing on their own.This...

IPONZ and New Zealand’s Ministry of Business have now pushed trade mark infringement and digital platform governance into the same practical frame, and that matters for more than headline value. The key shift is not simply that platforms are mentioned more explicitly. It is that rights verification is being moved earlier in the enforcement chain. The new rapid protection mechanism for domestic and cross-border e-commerce platforms is designed to help platforms identify the rights basis faster, reduce hesitation after a complaint arrives, and move obviously high-risk listings, stores or...

A case brief circulated this week by the EUIPO’s anti-infringement centre suggests that the EU’s enforcement playbook is shifting earlier in the chain. According to the account, infringers were no longer relying on one fake sign used repeatedly. Instead, they used generative AI to produce thousands of text-and-image trade mark variants at speed, trying to slip past keyword-based filters before distributing goods across Europe through fragmented cross-border small parcels. The policy response was just as notable: EUIPO said it would flag unusually frequent trade mark variant filings with no...

The 7th All Africa Intellectual Property Summit has been confirmed for 11-13 November 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya, under the theme “Mainstreaming Intellectual Property for Africa’s Trade, Industrial and Creative Economy Transformation.” The phrasing matters. It does not treat intellectual property as a narrow question of registration or enforcement. It places IP back inside trade strategy, industrial policy and the business logic of creative sectors.For companies watching Africa from the angles of brand building, licensing, content distribution, manufacturing partnerships or technology...

On 18 June 2026, the UK Intellectual Property Office published two design decisions worth reading together: O/0497/26 and O/0464/26. The first, a detergent capsule invalidity fight, shows how little mileage a design owner may get from leaning on colour or a slightly different outer outline when the informed user still sees the same overall visual impression. The second, involving house-shaped planters, moves in the other direction: the fact that both products draw on the image of a house was not enough to collapse them into the same design. Porch treatment, roof presentation, window and...

On 19 June 2026, Mexico’s Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) issued a practice-oriented guide on proving trade mark infringement and bad-faith filings involving virtual cross-border storefronts and e-commerce platforms. The document is aimed at a market problem that no longer looks like classic offline counterfeiting: anonymous sellers, shifting links, multi-platform migration and overseas operators trading through virtual shops that can disappear and reappear quickly. As Mexico moves toward the 22 July 2026 implementation milestone of its latest industrial property reform package,...

IP Australia’s current trade mark practice makes one point much clearer than before: in a three-year non-use dispute, it is not enough for a brand to point to a product page that happened to be visible from Australia. The harder question is whether the page, payment flow, delivery settings and surrounding marketing actually show that Australian consumers were being targeted. For cross-border e-commerce sellers, that is not a minor evidentiary tweak. It changes what kinds of digital records are likely to matter when a registration is challenged.The point is not that online evidence suddenly...

On 30 June, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) drew a sharper line around what counts as genuine use of an EU trade mark in the platform economy. The dispute came out of long-running revocation proceedings and focused on a point many brand owners have quietly leaned on for years: if products remain listed on cross-border marketplaces, the store page can be reached from across the Union, and a handful of EU orders do come through, is that enough to resist a non-use attack against an EUTM?The Court’s message is uncomfortable, but clear. Pan-EU accessibility is not the same...

On 1–2 July 2026, the AfCFTA Digital Trade Forum in Lagos produced one of the week’s clearest implementation signals: the AfCFTA Secretariat signed a 20-year concession arrangement for the AfCFTA Customs Modernisation Project (ACMP), with an estimated investment of US$3.1 billion. Public descriptions of the project emphasise interoperable customs systems, non-intrusive inspection technology, integrated data centres and multilingual customs portals designed to cut clearance times and reduce regulatory fragmentation.For IP owners, the more important point sits one layer deeper. Border...

Following the launch of the EU–Japan Intellectual Property Action on 27 April and the May renewal of the JPO–EUIPO memorandum on trade marks and designs, the Japan Patent Office has further clarified how the cooperation is expected to work in cross-border e-commerce cases. The emerging framework centres on faster exchanges of information about suspected trade mark and design infringements, allowing platforms, rights holders and competent authorities in both markets to align evidence and enforcement steps before sellers shift listings or inventory across borders.The mechanism will not...

The African Intellectual Property Organisation (OAPI) has put forward a draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market and E-Commerce Platform Liability, according to the policy outline now under discussion. The proposal moves beyond conventional copyright administration and focuses on how online marketplaces and digital platforms should respond when infringing goods or unauthorised digital content circulate through their services.The draft would seek to harmonise the regulatory approach across OAPI member states and introduce a “Notice and Stay-down” obligation for platforms. If...