Insights

Japan is starting to give the market a more workable answer on a question that has been hanging over virtual worlds for years: not every 3D digital asset in immersive spaces can safely rely on copyright alone. Virtual garments, architectural structures and other usable-looking assets may still qualify for copyright in some cases, but once the object looks less like pure artistic expression and more like a commercially exploitable design, rights holders may need to lean on the revised Design Act and adjacent enforcement tools instead.

The practical significance goes beyond classification. For platforms, game operators, UGC-space providers and brand owners, the bigger shift is procedural. When a complaint mixes copyright, design-like features and unfair competition logic, a platform hoping to stay within safe-harbour protection is under growing pressure to look at whether the notice actually explains the right asserted, the object being compared and the route of alleged infringement, rather than treating every takedown request as functionally equivalent.

Two copyright developments from 17 June deserve to be read together rather than separately. Uganda has formally passed its Copyright and Neighbouring Rights (Amendment) Bill, tightening penalties for digital infringement and piracy while placing stronger oversight on the collection and distribution of platform royalties. In Tunisia, the parliamentary legislative committee approved amendments to the national copyright law that would incorporate the Marrakesh Treaty’s copyright exceptions for blind and print-disabled persons into domestic law.

They move in different directions, but the policy signal is aligned. Copyright reform in Africa is no longer only about right recognition or conventional enforcement. It is now being pulled toward two harder questions: how to govern infringement and revenue flows in digital distribution, and how to modernise copyright exceptions in a way that is both internationally coherent and locally workable. For platforms, publishers, collecting societies and businesses that depend on digital circulation, that is a meaningful shift in regulatory centre of gravity.

Cape Verde’s new Industrial Property Code is now in force, and the significance of that change is becoming clearer as post-entry commentary gathers pace in June 2026. This is not a routine legislative refresh. It materially widens what can be protected, removes a procedural burden that had long frustrated trade mark applicants, and gives cross-border rights holders a more usable framework for integrating Cape Verde into regional and international filing plans.

The headline shifts are easy to list but harder to price correctly. Non-traditional trade marks such as multimedia, motion and hologram marks are now registrable. The Declaration of Intention to Use has been abolished. Unregistered designs can obtain automatic protection for three years. Patent and plant variety rules sit more clearly alongside PCT, Madrid and ARIPO-linked mechanisms. Taken together, those changes make Cape Verde less of a peripheral filing jurisdiction and more of a jurisdiction that deserves earlier strategic attention.

Algeria’s patent office, INAPI, has sent a clear practice signal in mid-June 2026: amendment deadlines will now be enforced strictly rather than elastically. Industry reporting indicates that amendments to patent applications must, in principle, be filed within one month from the filing date, while PCT cases entering the Algerian national phase face a one-month window from national phase entry. After that, only minor error corrections are likely to be entertained, and substantive changes will be refused and kept out of the examination track.

What makes this more than a technical diary reminder is the practical break with recent expectations. For some applicants, Algeria had become a jurisdiction where text could still be adjusted later in the process if examination strategy required it. That assumption now looks unsafe. More importantly, the stricter approach is being understood as applying not only to newly filed cases but also to pending applications already inside the system. Amendment strategy in Algeria is no longer a back-end clean-up exercise. It has to move to the front of the filing process.

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 door styling, and overall proportions all mattered.

The deeper signal is evidential, not just visual. In O/0464/26, one side said its designs had been disclosed earlier on Facebook, but the stated dates were not actually borne out in the evidence. That gap did not change the outcome only because the designs relied on were themselves registered designs with earlier publication dates. For businesses operating in a cross-border digital marketplace, that is the point to keep. If you want to rely on overseas social-media posts, marketplace listings or third-party online snapshots as prior disclosure, the UKIPO is unlikely to do the evidential stitching for you. A screenshot without a reliable chain of source, date and public accessibility is a weak foundation.

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 before the EPO when it is framed as a concrete security and authentication system: secure provisioning, hardware-rooted verification, anti-substitution protection and lifecycle traceability. For semiconductors, luxury authentication, medtech and industrial supply chains, that is a much more useful takeaway than the NFT label itself.