Israel has recently updated the application of its Extension of Periods and Postponement of Deadlines Law in response to the regional situation, giving temporary breathing room for selected regulatory approvals and certain administrative time limits. For IP owners and representatives, the relief may help where filings, responses or supporting documents are affected by disrupted operations. It should not be treated as a blanket extension, however. The competent authority, including the Israel Patent Office in relevant matters, may still shorten or remove the relief depending on the facts of...
Korea’s Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP) has launched a consolidated “AI, Data and Intellectual Property” webpage on the Korea Institute of Intellectual Property (KIIP) website, bringing together research materials on the intersection of artificial intelligence, data and IP. The page is organised around four areas: AI technology and patent trends, AI and IP policy systems, data and IP, and AI-generated works and IP. In practical terms, it gives users one place to follow issues such as copyright in AI-generated outputs, inventorship and examination questions for AI-related...
CIPC’s latest filing notice turns what many teams used to treat as routine document handling into a hard front-end compliance issue. The message is not subtle: scanned documents must be black and white and legible; one application may not be split across multiple emails; files over 10MB will be rejected; only standard PDF and TIFF formats are accepted; and CIPC will not download applications or parts of applications from other sites such as Google.The practical impact is bigger than the technical wording suggests. This is not simply a cleaner-scanning campaign. It shifts risk to the moment...
On June 4 and 5, OAPI brought its second Heads of Intellectual Property Offices Conference (HIPOC) to Abidjan, with WIPO Director General Daren Tang attending around a theme that sounds broad but is unusually revealing: intellectual property and youth entrepreneurship, and how to build an innovative and inclusive ecosystem. The difficult question is not whether IP matters to young businesses. It is whether IP offices can still operate on old administrative timing while startups iterate, pitch, license and launch across borders at far greater speed.OAPI is not starting from a weak...
As of now, the U.S. Copyright Office is still publicly pointing to the May 2025 pre-publication version of Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training, not to a formally effective final AI-training rule. Even so, the policy debate has become much more operational over the past year. If commercial model training continues to rely on platform datasets, open-web scraping and third-party licensing, questions about data provenance, authorization chains and the execution of rightsholder opt-outs are no longer abstract talking points. They are turning into concrete...
South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) has now shifted case-related filing onto its Case Management System (CMS). In Customer Notice 30 of 2026, after launching CMS on 27 March 2026, CIPC said that from 31 May 2026 the designated email addresses previously used for complaints, statutory submissions, service of legal documents and related correspondence were permanently decommissioned, and that those matters must now be filed through the CMS portal as the sole official channel.This is more than a housekeeping update. For teams that still run complaint handling...
China’s revised Patent Examination Guidelines, effective from 1 January 2026, move legality review much closer to the centre of AI and big-data patent examination. CNIPA did two important things at once. It added an explicit Article 5(1) review standard for AI and big-data applications, and it also revised the examination baseline so that, where necessary, examiners may review the specification itself rather than looking only at the claims. That is a meaningful shift. Applications involving data collection, label management, rule setting or recommendation decisions are no longer judged only...
ARIPO’s closing of the qualification stage for its new Learning Management System on 26 June 2026 is more than a procurement update. Read against the organisation’s 2022-2026 Strategic Plan, it looks like a late-stage digital infrastructure move aimed at tightening the operational backbone behind filing, examination support, notifications and member-state coordination.For applicants and advisers, the practical question is not whether ARIPO will have another platform. It is whether the Office is moving further toward a workflow in which procedural control, document exchange and deadline...
On 30 June, South Africa’s CIPC announced that its self-service centres in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town would be closed to the public for the day, citing precautionary measures linked to the planned March on March protest. Taken in isolation, that notice was not a formal permanent-closure statement. Read together with CIPC’s recent workflow changes, however, it points in a clearer direction: walk-in access is becoming less central just as case handling is being pushed more decisively into the Commission’s digital rails.The bigger shift is not simply that filing is moving...
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have jointly released AI-enabled Health Innovation and IP: From idea to impact. Developed under the Global Initiative on AI for Health, the publication is designed for innovators, start-ups, research institutions and partners seeking to move AI-based health technologies from early development to practical deployment. It covers patents, trade secrets, copyright and data protection, alongside licensing, collaboration, regulation, health-data governance...
