Insights

The ASEAN Secretariat announced on 20 September that the fourth ASEAN Economic Ministers–WIPO (AEM-WIPO) Consultation, held in Manila, welcomed the launch of new value-added services on the ASEAN IP Register: an IP Portfolio service and an IP Intelligence service, intended to give ASEAN stakeholders better data to inform their innovation decisions. The meeting also reviewed progress under the ASEAN–WIPO Memorandum of Understanding on the Expansion of Cooperation in Specific Areas, which currently oversees 44 activities for the advancement of the IP ecosystem in ASEAN.

The ASEAN IP Register, developed with WIPO support, has so far served mainly as a single regional search entry point for patent, trade mark and design data from the ASEAN member offices; the official announcement does not yet describe the functions, coverage or pricing of the two new services. Judging by their names and the stated purpose, the Register is moving from a search tool towards a regional data infrastructure for portfolio management and IP intelligence. J&C recommends that companies with filings across several ASEAN countries first use the existing Register to reconcile the status of their applications and registrations in each member state, and assess whether the new services can replace part of their third-party database searches once their functional descriptions are published.

The European Patent Office's revised Programme for Accelerated Prosecution (PACE) has applied since 1 February 2026 to PACE requests filed on or after that date. Under the current rules PACE is available for the examination stage only, and requests for accelerated search are no longer accepted. A request must be made on the dedicated EPO Form 1005 and filed online; the EPO does not process requests made informally or on paper. As a rule only one PACE request may be filed per application during examination, and applicants who request acceleration for all or most of their applications will be asked to make a selection and limit the number of requests. The EPO has stated that Form 1005 is planned to become available in MyEPO in the course of 2026.

An application leaves PACE when the applicant requests an extension of a time limit, when the PACE request is withdrawn, or when the application is refused, withdrawn or deemed withdrawn, and it cannot be restored to the programme afterwards; accelerated prosecution is suspended if a renewal fee is not paid by the due date. The removal and suspension rules also apply, from the entry into force of the revised programme, to applications that were already in PACE. The EPO continues to aim to issue the next office action within about three months of receiving the applicant's reply. For Euro-PCT applications, a request for early processing on entry into the European phase is a separate mechanism from PACE: accelerated examination in the European phase is not performed unless a PACE request is filed separately. J&C recommends treating "no extension requests and renewal fees paid on time" as a firm internal rule for every PACE case, and checking on each Euro-PCT file that both the early-processing request and the PACE request have actually been filed.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) has confirmed that the partially revised Patents Act enters into force on 1 January 2027. From that date the IPI will carry out a fee-based prior-art search for every national patent application and issue a search report; applicants may also request a full substantive examination covering novelty and inventive step. The search fee is 500 Swiss francs and the full examination costs a further 300 Swiss francs; the number of claims covered by the filing fee rises from 10 to 15, and technical documents may be filed and published in English without translation into an official language.

For applications already pending before the IPI, the Institute explains that applicants may request in writing, no later than 30 September 2026, that the invoice for the examination fee be issued early; if the fee is then paid on time, the application will be examined to completion under the current law. Applicants may instead request accelerated substantive examination once formal examination is complete, and here too the decisive point is that the examination fee is paid before 1 January 2027. Pending applications for which no examination fee has been paid by that date move automatically to the new law and receive a retrospective, fee-based search. J&C recommends that companies with pending Swiss applications check the examination-fee status of each file now and, where they prefer the old regime and wish to avoid the additional search fee and the new examination rules, request early invoicing before 30 September and pay promptly.

Korea's Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP) opened a legislative notice on 21 September for a proposed partial amendment to the Enforcement Rule of the Design Protection Act, with comments invited until 2 November. The proposal would substantially reduce the material required for typeface design applications: for Hangul typefaces, designated characters would fall from 500 to 209 and drawings from five to two; for Chinese-character typefaces, designated characters would fall from 900 to 310 and drawings from nine to two. MOIP says the change is intended to retain the structural information needed to identify design features while removing duplication, easing applicants' drafting burden and reducing corrections or supplements during filing and examination.

The proposal would also strengthen guidance on compatibility checks before 3D drawings are filed. Applicants should confirm that a 3D model displays correctly in the viewer used for examination; if a file cannot be opened or parts of the design do not display properly, another 3D file or 2D drawings may be used instead. J&C recommends adding examiner-side rendering to the pre-filing checklist whenever 3D files are used for Korean design applications and keeping a workable 2D fallback. The amendment is still at the legislative-notice stage and will require further legal review and promulgation before taking effect, so the final text and effective date should be checked against the formal rules.

Using the same pair of terminals for presence detection and power supply supported inventive step in EPO appeal T 1718/23, concerning an electronic vapour device. The Board found no reason, without hindsight, to replace the prior art’s separate detection path with detection through the power line. Its decision of 16 July 2026, published online on 14 September, dismissed the appeals of the proprietor and opponent 1, leaving the patent maintained in amended form under auxiliary request 7A. The main request and auxiliary request 1 lacked novelty, while request 7 contained an impermissible intermediate generalisation.

The outcome does not make every reduction in components inventive. J&C recommends documenting the structural change, the functions retained and the resulting technical effect, then explaining why the prior art would not prompt that particular modification. Request management also mattered: requests 2 to 6 were not admitted after their order was changed on appeal, and requests 4A to 6A should have been filed at first instance. Proprietors should settle their fallback claims, ranking and disclosure support during opposition rather than assume that appeal will provide a fresh opportunity to reorganise them.

In a published opinion issued on 16 September 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed dismissal of the DMCA copyright-management-information claim in Doe v. GitHub. Based on the complaint’s description of Copilot and Codex, the court treated their output as newly generated work that had never carried the information, rather than copies of existing works from which copyright management information (CMI) had been removed or altered. Similarity to source code and missing attribution therefore did not suffice on the pleaded output theory. The decision is not a general exemption for AI coding tools: the alternative training-input theory was forfeited, two contract claims remain pending, and the court expressed no view on whether the output infringes copyright.

The court also rejected literal identicality as an independent DMCA requirement; substantial reproduction without CMI may still provide strong circumstantial evidence of removal. J&C recommends reviewing code provenance, duplicate-code filters and open-source licence scanning, while retaining records of tool settings, outputs and subsequent processing. Rights holders should distinguish CMI removal, copyright infringement and licence breaches, and preserve evidence of the existing copy, the information it carried and how that information was removed or altered. Missing attribution alone does not establish the same legal claim in every case.