Insights

The 2026 Policy Address delivered by the Hong Kong SAR Government on 16 September sets out several intellectual property measures under the heading of developing a regional IP trading centre. On patents, the Intellectual Property Department will continue to develop and expand its patent examination team, strengthen its in-house examination capacity for original grant patent (OGP) applications in major technology fields, and roll out pilot facilitation measures for the relevant OGP applications in 2027. On patent agents, the Government has completed an industry consultation on the framework for regulating local patent agency services and the key issues involved; the industry generally supports a registration regime for patent agency services and agrees that professional titles and qualification requirements for registration should be provided for. A public consultation will be launched in 2026 and specific legislative proposals will be formulated in 2027. The address also states that the Hong Kong Intellectual Property Academy will be officially launched in the fourth quarter of 2026, that a bill will be introduced in 2026 to implement tax deductions for capital expenditure on purchasing IP rights or licences to use them, that the next phase of the IP financing sandbox is being prepared, and that a Strategy Committee on Intellectual Property Trading Development will be set up.

Neither of the two measures changes the rules immediately; both set a medium-term institutional direction. A larger examination team lets the department examine OGP applications in more major technology fields itself, but the scope, conditions and timetable of the facilitation pilot have not been published. Once a registration regime for patent agents is enacted, there will for the first time be statutory rules on who may practise in Hong Kong under the title of patent agent and with what qualifications, and transitional arrangements for existing practitioners will be a focus of the public consultation. J&C recommends that companies planning patent filings in Hong Kong decide, before the details of the 2027 pilot appear, which applications suit the original grant route and which are better re-registered as standard patents from a mainland or European patent, and watch for the department's pilot announcements; firms offering patent agency services in Hong Kong should study the qualification and professional-title provisions of the 2026 public consultation paper, assess their staff against them and submit views in time.

IP Australia's website currently carries an "email scam warning" pinned to the top of every page: a scam impersonating IP Australia is targeting trade mark applicants, and anyone who receives an unexpected email about their IP rights should verify the sender before taking any action. As of 22 September the banner appears on the home page, the trade marks section and the forms page, and links to the office's official guidance on spotting and avoiding IP scams. That guidance explains that scammers send notices, invoices, emails, text messages and phone calls about trade marks and other IP rights to pressure business owners and rights holders into paying unnecessary fees or sharing personal information, and that others impersonate registered IP attorneys, using their names, images and contact details on fake websites and notices. IP Australia's three-step approach is to stop, without replying, paying or sharing personal information; to check, by ignoring the links, phone numbers and email addresses in the correspondence, finding contact details from official sources, and logging in to Online Services or the public registers to confirm the status of the right, the amount due and the identity of the sender; and to protect, by reporting the scam and limiting any further impact.

This is not a legal reform, but it is a real and common risk for Australian clients: fake invoices create urgency and use false renewal dates to push early payment, while a genuine deadline is still there after it has been checked. J&C recommends that agencies send Australian clients a standard notice on recognising an official fee request: IP Australia accepts official fees only through Online Services or the methods listed on its website, and its genuine emails end in gov.au; any demand for payment, renewal or a “registration fee” should be checked by the agency in Online Services against the status of the right and the amount actually due before anyone pays; a client who has already paid or shared data should contact their bank at once and report the scam.

The trade mark priority examination page of Brazil's National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI), updated on 2 September, now carries an explicit warning: payment forms under GRU code 3020 for the "virtual marketplace platform" (plataforma de mercado virtual) category are no longer being issued, because the category's quota for the period from 1 September to 31 December has been used up. The category belongs to the INPI's pilot for priority trade mark examination on strategic and public-policy grounds and is aimed at applicants who need a registration in order to trade on an e-commerce platform. Under Portaria Normativa INPI/PR No. 67/2026, phase II of the pilot offers 3,000 requests in 2026, split into two four-month periods of 1,500 each, with a guaranteed floor of 100 per category per period and a cap of 10 requests per applicant; slots are allocated by the date and time of filing, and once the limit is reached the INPI stops accepting new requests. The official fee for this category is R$890, halved to R$445 for micro and small businesses and individual microentrepreneurs.

Those most affected are cross-border sellers and platform-owned brands that must show a Brazilian trade mark registration to the marketplace, together with rights holders trying to secure a registration before a squatter does, since helping to resolve conflicts and disputes is one of the pilot's declared aims. For the rest of this quota period their applications can only be examined in the ordinary queue; where a priority request is not granted, the underlying application continues to be processed normally. The free category for elderly applicants, persons with disabilities, persons with serious illness and Inova Simples companies, and the other paid categories of the pilot, are not covered by the warning and remain subject to their own quotas. J&C recommends that businesses trading or planning to trade on Brazilian marketplaces first check whether they qualify under another pilot category or a free category and, if so, file under that category; those that do not should file an ordinary application as early as possible, keep the platform's request for proof of registration on file, and follow the weekly quota statistics published by the INPI so that they are ready to request priority in the next quota period.

The Trademark Law of the People's Republic of China, as revised by the 23rd session of the Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress on 26 June 2026, will take effect on 1 January 2027. One change bears directly on trademark use: revised Article 57 keeps the rule that any entity or individual may apply to cancel a registered trademark that has not been used for three consecutive years without justified reason, and adds that the trademark authority under the State Council "may cancel" such a trademark, so that the authority can now start a cancellation on its own initiative rather than only on a third party's request.

Against hoarding, new Article 19 provides that an application for registration that is not intended for use and clearly exceeds normal production and business needs shall be refused; Article 54 adds that an applicant who files in breach of Article 19 will be given a warning by the enforcement authority and may additionally be fined up to 100,000 yuan. From 2027, therefore, an unused registration may be cancelled on a competitor's application or cleared away by the authority itself, and bulk filings beyond business needs can themselves attract a penalty. J&C recommends that companies holding large defensive or reserve trademark portfolios complete a portfolio clean-up before the new law takes effect, compile use evidence for the last three years mark by mark and class by class, and decide, for marks with no use plan, whether to let them lapse rather than renew them.

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.