Insights

On March 26, 2026, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) announced that Commissioner Shen Changyu held bilateral talks with WIPO Director General Daren Tang on the latest developments in intellectual property and cooperation on Technology and Innovation Support Centers (TISCs). In the meeting, CNIPA said it is studying the formulation of the national 15th Five-Year Plan for the protection and utilization of intellectual property as the top-level design for the next five years, and that China will continue to participate actively in global IP governance under the WIPO framework. WIPO, for its part, highlighted that China remains among the global leaders in PCT international patent, Hague international design and Madrid international trademark filings.

This development is better read as a policy signal than as notice of an immediate rule change. It does not mean that the filing procedures of the PCT, Madrid or Hague systems have already been revised. But it does point to two practical directions for businesses and advisers: first, China’s next five-year IP agenda may bring new policy priorities and resource allocation around protection, utilization and overseas deployment; second, international filing systems remain clearly positioned as one of the main channels through which Chinese innovators compete globally, with future emphasis likely to shift toward quality of use, alignment with international rules and protection in emerging fields.

On March 26, 2026, WIPO launched a targeted consultation for international trademark registration holders and representatives on a question that goes well beyond procedural fine-tuning: should the Offices of designated Madrid System members be required to issue a national or regional certificate when protection is granted, and again when an international registration is renewed? The survey is anonymous, takes no more than 10 minutes to complete, closes on April 24, 2026, and WIPO has expressly stated that the responses will directly inform discussions at the next session of the Working Group on the Legal Development of the Madrid System in October 2026.

This announcement deserves close attention because it touches a long-standing institutional boundary inside the Madrid System. An international registration may already have a clear record and protection status within the system, yet in some local enforcement, administrative, transactional and renewal contexts, right holders may still be asked to produce a document that looks and functions more like a national or regional certificate. In other words, the issue is not merely whether one extra paper should exist. It is whether the Madrid System should move toward a stronger bridge between centrally administered international rights and locally usable proof of those rights.

On 31 March 2026, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) published directions under section 66 of the Trade Marks Act 1994 to update the fee fields in a group of fee-bearing trade mark forms, with the directions taking effect on 1 April 2026. UKIPO also issued accompanying guidance explaining that the relevant fees are those prescribed by The Intellectual Property Fees (Miscellaneous Amendments, Revocation and Transitional Provisions) Rules 2026 (SI 2026/183).

The Schedule shows that this is not a narrow form refresh affecting only one filing step. It reaches across applications, oppositions, renewals, recordals of ownership and security interests, invalidity, revocation including non-use revocation, information requests, licence recordals and appeals to the Appointed Person. For brand owners and advisers, this is therefore more than housekeeping. It is a procedural update with direct consequences for templates, quotations, submission timing and pre-filing fee checks.

South Korea’s Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP) has announced that its 2026 budget for intellectual property dispute response will rise to KRW 46.836 billion, up KRW 14.520 billion from the previous year. The policy target is highly practical: many companies still struggle to act effectively even after they have been sued or infringed because dispute response remains expensive, specialist-driven and difficult to coordinate across borders. The announcement makes that policy logic concrete through two representative scenarios: a generative AI company sued overseas by a non-practicing entity (NPE), and export-oriented fashion companies harmed by overseas counterfeiting and brand free-riding.

What matters here is not only that more money is being allocated. MOIP is signaling a broader shift from ad hoc, after-the-fact relief toward an integrated support framework that combines early risk detection, overseas rights deployment, enforcement coordination, platform measures and anti-counterfeit technology adoption. For Korean companies already exporting or building their next phase of growth abroad, that suggests South Korea’s IP policy is moving beyond the question of whether public support exists and toward the more important question of whether companies can access a usable dispute-response infrastructure.

In March 2026, EUIPO completed two closely linked moves in the digital-enforcement space. From 3 to 5 March, it co-hosted an IP OSINT Tools Workshop with the Spanish National Police in Gran Canaria to help enforcement officers use open-source intelligence tools against online piracy, counterfeiting and other cyber-enabled crime. Then, on 19 and 20 March in Athens, it trained judges and prosecutors through a practical seminar on moving “from the open web to the dark web,” placing open-web intelligence, dark-web awareness and OSINT exercises directly inside a judicial-learning framework. For brand owners, this is no longer just a training story. It is a sign that Europe’s IP enforcement architecture is institutionalising digital-investigation capacity much earlier in the case cycle.

When those March activities are read together with EUIPO’s 2026 work programme — which points to practical investigative and prosecutorial guidance using advanced technologies, web-monitoring tools for enforcers, and stronger cooperation under the 2026–2029 EMPACT cycle — the direction becomes clearer. The EU is gradually moving anti-counterfeiting work away from a model centred only on warehouse seizures, platform notices and isolated leads, and toward a hybrid model driven by data, cross-border coordination and technological confrontation. The most important development is not simply that EUIPO has introduced another tool. It is that the entry point and evidentiary structure of future cross-border trademark-counterfeiting cases are starting to change.

At the end of March, the European Patent Office (EPO) publicly outlined the latest outcome of its dialogue with the German Association of Industry Intellectual Property Experts (VPP) and major corporate representatives: AI will continue to be integrated more deeply into the patent granting process and user-facing services, but this will not mean handing legal judgment over to machines. The shared position is becoming clearer: AI should strengthen efficiency, consistency and accessibility, while final legal decisions, procedural control and institutional accountability must remain firmly in human hands.

This matters not because “patent offices use AI” is a novel headline, but because the EPO is now defining the institutional role of AI more precisely. AI is being framed not as a substitute for examiners, but as an amplifier of examiner capability. It is not being presented as a shortcut for lowering examination density, but as a foundational tool for improving search, classification, information handling and workflow coordination. For applicants, in-house IP teams and external representatives, the real signal is that European patent examination will continue to become more digital and more intelligent, while still insisting on procedural fairness, traceable responsibility and legal rigor.