The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reminded applicants that, from July 20, 2026, any patent matter involving at least one applicant or patent owner domiciled outside the United States and its territories will generally need to be handled by a registered U.S. patent practitioner in good standing. The requirement covers utility, plant and design patent matters and applies to filings received on or after that date, including amendments, responses, information disclosure statements, petitions and most other correspondence. Pending applications filed before July 20 are not exempt from the...

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...

The easiest mistake to make here is to describe recent PTAB developments as if the Office had already issued a stand-alone rule aimed specifically at AI-generated prior art. The more accurate picture is narrower and more important. Through a set of concrete procedural moves, the USPTO has started pushing harder on three questions that matter in inter partes review: where the asserted art came from, whether it really qualifies as a patent or printed publication, and how far a petitioner should be expected to explain its search path. The July 31, 2025 memorandum enforcing Rule 104(b)(4) made...

On 14 July 2026, the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia (MyIPO) introduced the Digital & Green Gateway (DGG), an accelerated patent examination route aimed at inventions involving artificial intelligence models, big-data processing algorithms and clean-energy technologies. Under the announced framework, applications that satisfy the basic formal requirements may request DGG treatment without an additional acceleration fee, with MyIPO targeting a first office action within four months. Eligible technology start-ups may also receive a reduction of up to 50% in the substantive...

On February 17, 2026, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched the World Intellectual Property Report 2026: Technology on the Move. Drawing on 250 years of historical evidence and five decades of patent-citation analysis, the report asks a question that matters more than invention alone: how quickly, how widely and how deeply do new technologies actually diffuse across countries, firms and industries?The report’s most important message is twofold. First, diffusion is clearly accelerating. Technologies such as the telegraph and the automobile took around four decades to...

On April 8, 2026, the Intellectual Property Tribunal of China’s Supreme People’s Court published a hearing notice confirming that it would publicly hear an invention patent invalidation administrative dispute on April 10, 2026 at 9:30 a.m. in its Fourth Courtroom. According to the notice, the appellant is the China National Intellectual Property Administration, the appellees are Zhenjiang Best New Material Co., Ltd. and Nautilus Investment Co., Ltd., and Shenzhen Dafenzi Technology Co., Ltd. appears as the third party from the first-instance proceedings. No case number was disclosed in the...

By mid-July 2026, two significant intellectual property reforms in East Africa had moved into sharper focus. Tanzania’s Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill, 2026 remains under legislative consideration and proposes coordinated changes to the Trade and Service Marks Act and the Patents (Registration) Act. The draft would recognise ARIPO trade marks designating Tanzania, strengthen protection for well-known, collective and certification marks, extend the patent term from ten years to twenty years from filing, and reinforce the utility model framework. If adopted in its current...

After hosting the 19th IP5 Heads of Office Meeting on 12 June, the Japan Patent Office said on 16 June that the five offices had agreed on new directions for AI-focused co-operation and would establish a dedicated working group to carry the discussion forward. Read literally, that announcement is still framework-level. It does not yet amount to a single binding AI patent rulebook shared word for word across Japan, Europe, China, Korea and the United States.What matters for applicants is something narrower and more practical. The JPO already has updated AI case examples, refreshed handbook...

India’s Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks (CGPDTM) has notified users that scheduled maintenance of its copyright e-services has been completed, with online filing, public search and e-register services fully restored from 6:00 p.m. on 12 May 2026. For applicants and representatives, the immediate task is practical rather than theoretical: check pending filings, any deadline arrangements linked to the outage, and the accuracy of system records once the portal is back in operation.The notice comes as CGPDTM is also promoting recent gains in patent...

One of the most common ways this USPTO story is now described is also one of the least accurate. The Office did propose a major change in May 2024 that would have tied obviousness-type double patenting (ODP) and terminal disclaimer practice much more tightly together. Under that proposal, a patent linked through a terminal disclaimer could have faced serious enforceability consequences if a related patent in the chain ended up with a claim finally held unpatentable or invalid over prior art. But that proposal never became an effective final rule.The date that matters is December 4, 2024. On...

As CIPO's public consultation on faster patent examination approaches its June 23 close, the Canadian system is starting to show a much clearer shape. The existing green-technology fast lane is not being displaced. Instead, it has become the reference point for a broader redesign that now puts 2 additional pathways into sharper focus: a fee-based Track 1 ultra-fast program for general applicants, and a no-fee accelerated route for patent applications tied to key technology areas.This matters for more than speed. CIPO is gradually turning acceleration from a simple question of whether an...

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...

At the end of March, the European Patent Office (EPO) publicly outlined the latest outcome of its dialogue with the German Association of Industry Intellectual Property Experts (VPP) and major corporate representatives: AI will continue to be integrated more deeply into the patent granting process and user-facing services, but this will not mean handing legal judgment over to machines. The shared position is becoming clearer: AI should strengthen efficiency, consistency and accessibility, while final legal decisions, procedural control and institutional accountability must remain firmly in...

The IP5 offices — CNIPA, the EPO, the JPO, the KIPO and the USPTO — have jointly decided to extend the IP5 Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) pilot for another three years, from January 6, 2026 to January 5, 2029. The offices also made clear that the requirements and procedures for filing PPH requests under the pilot will remain unchanged. In practical terms, applicants will still be able to rely on an existing and familiar work-sharing route to accelerate related patent applications across major jurisdictions at a time when examination efficiency, budget discipline and filing speed are...

The USPTO’s recent memorandum on Rule 132 Subject Matter Eligibility Declarations puts a sharper lens on a familiar but often underdeveloped argument in AI, software and biotechnology patent prosecution: whether the claimed invention improves technology rather than merely using a computer to reach a desired result. The agency is not creating a separate patentability regime for AI. It is asking applicants to connect eligibility arguments to technical facts already disclosed in the application.For applicants, the practical message is direct. Describing an AI model that classifies, predicts,...

The market reaction to the Japan Patent Office’s mid-2026 revision of its AI-related invention guidance should not stop at the headline that MLLMs and cross-modal generative AI are now being treated more explicitly. The practical shift is deeper. For applicants, the revision changes how the specification should be written, where the technical contribution needs to be located, and how inventive-step and description arguments are likely to be tested in prosecution.The direction is not surprising. JPO had already added 10 new AI-related examination cases in 2024, and its March 2026 report on...

After a pilot phase, the European Patent Office has announced the wider use of AI-assisted tools for preparing minutes of oral proceedings. Under the workflow described by the EPO, audio from the hearing can first be transcribed by an AI tool, after which members of the division may use another AI tool to prepare a draft of the minutes; the final record remains under the responsibility of the competent examining or opposition division. The point is not to automate oral proceedings, but to make an important procedural record faster to produce and easier to check.For applicants, opponents and...

ARIPO is no longer treating online services as a platform that merely exists in the background. In May, its high-level mission to Mozambique was followed by publicly reported workshop activity in Maputo that put online filing, application tracking and online fee payment at the centre of the discussion. For a regional filing environment that has often depended on paper movement, fragmented touchpoints and slow status visibility, that is more than outreach. It is an attempt to change how users actually enter and manage the ARIPO route.ARIPO’s own service pages already describe online...

According to SEALSQ’s announcement of 18 June 2026, the European Patent Office has granted a divisional patent covering what the company calls a “Back-to-Physical” NFT architecture. The point is not an NFT in the abstract. The claimed model ties cryptographic credentials and ownership records to tamper-resistant semiconductor hardware so that a physical object carries a verifiable digital identity at chip level.That is why this development matters beyond blockchain headlines. For patent teams, the more interesting signal is that a data- and asset-heavy concept may become easier to defend...

Moldova became the 40th member state of the European Patent Organisation on 1 June 2026. European patent applications filed on or after that date now automatically designate Moldova as an EPC contracting state, removing the separate validation fee previously used under the validation system. The same filing-date test applies to PCT cases: an international application filed on or after 1 June 2026 can cover Moldova through the European phase.The transition still requires careful docketing. European and international applications filed before 1 June, as well as divisional applications derived...