Insights

South Africa's Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) has issued Notice 49 of 2026 announcing scheduled maintenance of all CIPC systems and services from 17:00 on Friday 25 September until 07:00 on Monday 28 September. The CIPC states that during this period no applications and services will be available, and apologises for the inconvenience. Because the CIPC administers company registrations as well as trade marks, patents and designs, the window covers electronic filing, responses, renewals and searches for trade marks, patents and designs, together with company matters.

This is a clearly timed planned shutdown rather than an outage, so the response is correspondingly simple: bring forward any act that falls inside or right next to the window. J&C recommends that anyone with a South African trade mark, patent or design deadline falling between 25 September and 28 September, or shortly after, complete electronic filings within priority periods, renewals, responses to examination reports and opposition papers before 17:00 on 25 September and keep the filing receipts; where a deadline expires during the downtime and it is unclear whether it will be extended, act on the earliest date rather than counting on filing after the systems return.

On 21 September the European Patent Office (EPO) announced that its Technology Intelligence Platform (TIP) provides free access to PATSTAT data together with enhanced Python notebooks, letting users process, analyse and visualise worldwide patent data in the browser and blend it with business data and other statistics. The platform already offers more than 100 Python notebooks, supported by e-learning modules and quick-start guides; a new collection of advanced PATSTAT notebooks takes users from the fundamental concepts of patent data to advanced patent analytics methods, covering patent families, filing and publication dates, legal events, citation dynamics, filing strategies and technology trends, with reproducible extraction and analysis examples. TIP gives each user a secure browser-based environment, can synchronise code with code-sharing platforms, and produces visualisations from geographical maps and network diagrams to heatmaps and citation flows. Access requires only an EPO account, while the PATSTAT data itself remains available as a bulk data set or through PATSTAT Online.

This is not a change in examination rules but a lowering of the barrier to patent intelligence: PATSTAT analyses that once required a self-hosted database and computing environment can now be run free of charge in an EPO-hosted environment, with the most direct value for competitor monitoring, technology roadmapping and early freedom-to-operate research. J&C recommends that teams doing competitor monitoring, technology roadmapping or early freedom-to-operate research register for TIP with an EPO account, run the official advanced notebooks in the test environment first, then substitute their own technology classes, applicant lists or product keywords; check how PATSTAT defines patent families, legal events and citations before using the results in external reports, and note the non-commercial terms of use of the notebooks.

Brazil's National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) published a notice at 10:38 local time on 22 September stating that some services are temporarily unavailable and that its technical team is working to restore them as soon as possible; once services are back to normal, the INPI will publish an unavailability report (Relatório de Indisponibilidade) setting out the period of the outage. At the time of writing, the INPI's technical availability portal, where system status and unavailability reports are published, was itself showing a maintenance page. This is not the first such episode this year: on 3 August the INPI likewise announced that its services were temporarily unavailable owing to a technical incident and, after restoration, published the technical unavailability report under its established procedure.

For applicants the point to watch is not the outage itself but its overlap with procedural deadlines: where a trade mark, patent or design response, an opposition, a fee payment or any other act due that day could not be completed because the systems were down, the INPI has a mechanism for restitution of the deadline (devolução de prazo) based on the unavailability report, and whether it applies depends on the window the report finally recognises and on the applicant's evidence. J&C recommends that any applicant with a Brazilian deadline on 22 September immediately keep screenshots of the error pages and the times of each attempt to log in or file, and note the act that should have been completed; once the INPI publishes the unavailability report, compare the recognised window and file a request for restitution of the deadline with that evidence within the prescribed time, rather than waiting for the report before acting and risking the deadline for the request itself.

On 22 September the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) held a themed press conference in Jinan, Shandong, on how intellectual property is supporting high-quality development in the Yellow River basin. Spokesperson Heng Fuguang said that by August 2026 the nine provinces and regions along the river held more than 910,000 valid invention patents and 10,074,000 valid trademark registrations, with average annual growth over the last Five-Year Plan period 1.8 and 2.1 percentage points above the national average; the region has 1,758 geographical indication products and 2,375 collective and certification marks registered as geographical indications, each one third of the national total. The conference also presented the provinces' differing approaches: figures published earlier by Shandong show that, through its patent pre-examination reform and fast-track green channel, more than 41,000 invention patents have been granted via the fast track with an examination period 84 per cent shorter than the ordinary route; Shandong, one of the first data-IP pilot provinces, has registered data exceeding one hundred billion records, Shaanxi leads a five-province north-western mechanism for data-IP registration and joint enforcement, and Shanxi has also been approved for a data-IP pilot.

The briefing was a stock-take of existing work rather than the launch of a new regime, and is best read as a policy and industry observation: first, IP growth in the region is tilting towards basin-wide coordination and commercialisation, with patent pools, industrialisation projects and the protection centres' fast-track channels as the common tools; second, data-IP registration is moving from pilots to regional cooperation, and registration certificates are already being used in pledge financing, but their legal nature still rests on provincial pilot rules with no unified national legislation. J&C recommends that companies with manufacturing or R&D bases in the Yellow River provinces build the local protection centres' fast-track pre-examination into the filing schedule for core technologies, after first confirming that their industry falls within the centre's pre-examination scope; companies holding large business datasets should watch their province's data-IP registration platform and use a registration certificate as supporting evidence in data transactions and financing, without treating it as a statutory exclusive right.

On 17 September WIPO issued Information Notice No. 39/2026: at the request of the Israel trade mark office, the Madrid individual fee for designating Israel changes from 17 October 2026. For an international application or a subsequent designation, the fee for one class rises from CHF 471 to CHF 503 and the fee for each additional class from CHF 354 to CHF 378; for renewal, the fee for one class rises from CHF 840 to CHF 896 and for each additional class from CHF 709 to CHF 757. The new amounts apply to international applications received by the Office of origin on or after 17 October, subsequent designations filed on or after that date and renewals effected on or after that date; until 16 October the old amounts continue to apply.

One practical detail: WIPO's summary page of individual fees under the Madrid Protocol currently shows a last update of 23 August 2026 and still lists Israel at CHF 471 and CHF 354, so it does not yet reflect the notice of 17 September. J&C recommends that applicants designating Israel or renewing registrations that cover Israel around 17 October rely on Notice No. 39/2026 and on the fee calculator on the day of filing rather than on the old rates shown on the summary page; quotes and payments should be set by the date the Office of origin receives the application or the renewal is effected, and subsequent designations or renewals that can be completed by 16 October can still be handled at the old rates.

This article updates our report of 13 September, “Saudi Arabia Sets Madrid Filing Rules Ahead of October Entry”.

On 1 September WIPO issued Information Notice No. 37/2026 publishing the declaration made by Saudi Arabia under Article 8(7)(a) of the Madrid Protocol: an individual fee of CHF 1,397 per class of goods or services applies where Saudi Arabia is designated in an international application or a subsequent designation, rising to CHF 1,719 per class for collective or certification marks; renewal costs CHF 1,397 per class, or CHF 1,612 per class where payment is made within the grace period. The declaration takes effect on 8 October 2026 and applies to international applications received by the Office of origin on or after that date, subsequent designations filed on or after that date, and renewals effected on or after that date. On the same day the Madrid Protocol enters into force for Saudi Arabia: applicants from other members may designate Saudi Arabia in new international applications or extend existing international registrations to it by subsequent designation, and Saudi applicants may file through the Madrid System for other members. Saudi Arabia has already declared an 18-month time limit for provisional refusals and does not accept requests for division based on international registrations.

Compared with a national filing: the official fees listed on the Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property website are an application fee of SAR 1,000, a publication fee of SAR 500 and a registration and certificate fee of SAR 5,000, in total SAR 6,500 per application, while a Madrid designation is charged at CHF 1,397 per class. The official fees of the two routes are of a similar order; the real differences lie in local agent costs, examination timing, the cost of handling refusals and the way renewals are managed. J&C recommends that companies already holding Saudi national registrations need not rush to switch to Madrid and can compare the two routes at renewal; companies not yet in Saudi Arabia can add it after 8 October through a new international application or a subsequent designation, but should first trim their goods and services in view of the 18-month refusal period and the bar on division, and line up a local agent in advance to handle provisional refusals; multi-class filers should total CHF 1,397 per class against the national fees per application plus agent costs before choosing a route.