Insights

The UK Intellectual Property Office published its new guidance, How to spot fake fashion when shopping second-hand, on 27 May 2026 and followed it with a press release on 28 May as the resale fashion market continues to expand. Developed with support from Vinted, the guidance gives shoppers a more practical checklist for spotting suspicious pricing, seller behaviour, listing photos, verification services and payment methods. The IPO also said that one in four UK second-hand clothing buyers unknowingly bought a counterfeit online in the last year, while one in three do not check authenticity before buying and nearly 60% reported quality, durability or refund problems after receiving a fake.

This matters for more than consumer awareness. The UK is starting to push anti-counterfeiting work further into the mechanics of recommerce itself, not just traditional enforcement after the fact. As circular fashion grows, the more important question is whether platforms can improve reporting tools, authentication pathways and listing quality early enough to keep suspicious goods from circulating at scale.

Mexico’s third-year declaration of actual and effective use is no longer the kind of maintenance filing that can be treated as an afterthought. For registrations that fall within this regime, the owner must file within the three-month window after the third anniversary and tie the surviving scope of protection to the goods or services that are actually in use. As discussion grows around digital filing, automated checks and the risk of manufactured use materials, this step is starting to look less like a form and more like an evidence test.

What can already be verified from public sources is clear enough: the obligation applies to relevant registrations granted on or after 10 August 2018; missing the filing carries loss-of-rights consequences; and the content of the declaration can shape the scope that remains protected. The real warning sign is not whether a particular new tool has been officially named, but whether the screenshots, invoices, brochures and distributor records that companies once used to “patch together” a filing can still withstand scrutiny on timing, identity, territory and product-service alignment.

On May 9, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released the pre-publication version of Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training. The report does not endorse either extreme. It does not say all AI training is infringement, and it does not offer a blanket fair use safe harbor. Instead, it pushes the analysis back to the facts that matter: what was copied, how the material was obtained, whether licensing markets exist, and how the use affects rightsholders in practice. For AI companies, that is a meaningful shift. Large-scale scraping is now much harder to frame as a neutral technical step.

The practical takeaway is even sharper. The Office discusses terms of use, robots.txt, metadata, watermarking, and other ways for rightsholders to signal that their material should not be used for AI training. It also notes that voluntary opt-out measures can have merit. Once those signals become more standardized and machine-readable, developers who ignore them, or who rely on pirated or unlawfully accessed material, will have a more difficult time defending their conduct as fair use. The question is no longer whether opt-out language matters. It is whether companies can prove that their data intake systems actually recognize and respect it.

For applicants entering Canada from the PCT route with an AI system listed as the sole inventor in the international phase, CIPO’s current national-phase guidance, compliance framework and the latest Canadian inventorship position now point in the same direction. A pure AI inventor designation is not going to carry a case smoothly into Canada. If inventor details, entitlement statements or applicant status do not line up with what Canadian law requires, the file is likely to run into a compliance notice before anything else moves very far.

The practical importance of this development is wider than the familiar headline that “Canada does not accept AI as an inventor.” The more useful lesson is procedural. National phase entry is becoming a poor place to discover that inventorship was treated too loosely in the international stage. For AI-heavy filings, applicants need to identify the natural person or persons who actually contributed to the inventive concept, organize entitlement documents earlier, and leave room to cure defects without derailing filing strategy or examination timing.

As the 2026 WIPO-EUIPO IP Management Clinic for green and sustainability-focused SMEs approaches its 10 June application deadline, a clearer support map is emerging for green-tech companies in the EU, EFTA countries and Ukraine. WIPO says the program will help selected businesses work on IP identification, protection, commercialization and international growth, while the EUIPO’s 2026 SME Fund continues to show where the filing tools sit in practice: 75% reimbursement for EU-level and national or regional trade mark and design fees, and 50% reimbursement for basic application, designation and subsequent designation fees for trade marks and designs outside the EU when filed through WIPO. For smaller companies trying to take climate-tech, clean-energy or sustainability products abroad, IP is starting to look less like a back-office formality and more like part of market-entry planning.

The acceleration piece is also real, but it is not a special green lane. Under the EUIPO’s current Fast Track conditions, compliant EU trade mark applications can reach publication in half the time or less than regular filings, and EU design filings can also use an accelerated Fast Track route. That said, speed still depends on filing discipline, classification choices and payment conditions, and as of late May 2026 the EUIPO has already stated that Voucher 2 for trade marks and designs is unavailable for new applications because funds have been exhausted. That is probably the clearest practical message here: green-tech SMEs should decide earlier which brands, product appearances and target markets matter most, because the support toolkit exists, but the window does not always stay open.

KIPO’s newly released package on priority examination in designated technology fields does two things at once for AI patent filers. It moves “AI large-model architecture” and “embodied-intelligence control algorithms” into the top priority review lane, and it reshapes the fee logic around that lane. Where the application is prepared cleanly and the fast-track basis is substantiated from the outset, a first office action could realistically arrive in roughly three months.

The more strategic move is the new fee incentive. Applicants that file with a detailed explanation of the lawful open-source basis of the training dataset, or documentary proof that the relevant permissions are properly licensed, may obtain a 15% reduction in the official priority-examination fee. That turns data provenance from a background compliance issue into something that can affect filing cost, filing timing and even which inventions are ready to be pushed forward first.