Insights

Recent debate around the USPTO and Section 101 has made one point sound simpler than it really is: that an AI patent claim becomes easier to defend as soon as the application says the invention involves model training. The official materials tell a narrower and more useful story. From the 2024 AI subject matter eligibility update, to the August 2025 reminder memo, to the late-2025 MPEP change prompted by Ex parte Desjardins, the clearer direction is not a special AI shortcut. It is that claims framed as a black box that takes in data and produces a result remain vulnerable to abstraction, while claims that reflect a concrete improvement in how the model or system actually operates stand on firmer ground in the Section 101 analysis.

That distinction has real prosecution consequences. An application may contain pages of technical background, but if the claim is ultimately drafted as little more than “receive data, train or infer, output a result,” the applicant is still likely to face the familiar problem of an abstract idea implemented on a computer. What helps more is not a broad statement that the model is more accurate or more efficient, but a claim set that shows where the technical improvement lives and how it changes the internal operation of the system.

Debate around “shadow brand” filings in Latin America has moved up a gear. INAPI’s 2026 trademark guidelines further refine procedural practice, and opposition filings have already been folded into an electronic intake framework. The larger shift is not a cosmetic tweak to procedure. It is a change in what the office is willing to look at. The question is no longer confined to whether one sign resembles another. It is increasingly about how a filer behaves across a portfolio of applications.

What the public record clearly supports today is that INAPI is deepening digital procedure, clarifying opposition and invalidation routes, and continuing to treat bad-faith registrations as a problem that can be pursued over time. By contrast, the market narrative around a formal “filing metadata assessment” model, a trigger tied to more than 10 unrelated Nice classes, or a short deadline to produce a genuine business-use plan is better understood, for now, as a strong enforcement direction rather than a fully published rulebook. Even so, the signal is hard to miss: in Latin America, stockpiling filings without a credible commercial story is becoming much harder to defend.

Canada’s latest public signals on generative AI and copyright are no longer just about labelling synthetic content. The direction is broader: platforms are being pushed away from a pure notice-and-takedown posture and toward a framework built on prior authorisation, transparency and a more defensible approach to remuneration. Across the 2025 copyright consultation summary and the 2026 Canadian Heritage committee report, the same point keeps resurfacing: creators’ ability to consent, be credited and be paid cannot simply dissolve because AI systems scale faster than copyright administration does.

The pressure is especially acute for short-form video and social platforms flooded with AI covers, voice swaps and visual remixes. Public materials do not yet establish a formal statutory “Royalty Sandbox” in Canada, but the policy direction is increasingly hard to miss. If platforms continue to rely mainly on safe-harbour style takedowns while monetising high-volume synthetic derivatives, they may soon face a more direct expectation to verify rights, preserve auditable usage records and hold back part of the revenue where ownership and licensing remain unresolved.

Colombia’s SIC this week issued a national-stage practice guide for international industrial design registrations designating Colombia. The headline point is not merely administrative. The office has now aligned its handling with the Hague System’s deferred publication mechanism, allowing applicants to request up to 30 months of delay before the design is made public. For companies preparing a Latin American rollout, that creates something they rarely had before in the region: time to secure a filing position without immediately exposing the design to the market.

That matters because design filing strategy in Latin America has often forced an awkward trade-off. File early, and the design may surface before distributors, pricing and launch materials are ready. File late, and novelty, priority or copycat risk becomes harder to manage. Colombia’s move begins to separate those two moments. Applicants can lock in the application pathway first and choose a later publication moment that better matches product launch, channel build-out and anti-copying strategy.

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 of submission. For company secretarial teams, outside counsel, and cross-border groups coordinating South African filings from shared drives and regional admin hubs, poor scan discipline can now create immediate rejection, duplicate billing exposure, and avoidable timing losses before a matter even reaches substantive review.

In early June, WIPO Director General Daren Tang appeared in Abuja for the unveiling of the WIPO Nigeria Office, while Nigeria simultaneously pushed its National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS) into a much more operational frame. Read separately, these look like two familiar headlines: a new office and a new policy. Read together, they point to something larger. Nigeria is trying to move intellectual property out of the narrow register-and-enforce box and into the machinery of creative exports, research commercialization and cross-border investment.

There is one detail worth handling carefully. WIPO’s own Nigeria office page says the office was established in Abuja in January 2020, while Nigerian official statements around this week’s ceremony described the Abuja office as the first in Sub-Saharan Africa and one of only seven worldwide. The wording is not identical, but the underlying signal is still clear enough: Abuja is being elevated as a regional IP node, and NIPPS is the policy layer meant to make that elevation economically meaningful.