Insights

On 24 June 2026, Thailand’s Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) signalled a sharper enforcement model for online counterfeiting. Working with Meta Thailand and other platform stakeholders, the agency is no longer framing the issue as a simple takedown exercise. The emphasis has moved toward automated detection, digital intelligence and source-tracing that can connect anonymous online sellers to warehouses and offline supply points.

The timing matters. Thailand’s B2C e-commerce market reached 970 billion baht in 2025 and is projected to grow to 1.8 trillion baht by 2030. Against that backdrop, DIP said recent enforcement actions had already led to 116 arrests and the seizure of 224,042 counterfeit items in the first five months of 2026. For brand owners, the message is direct: platform governance, trademark enforcement and digital evidence collection are now converging into one workflow.

China has opened public consultation on the second-review draft of its revised Trademark Law, and the policy message is not subtle: the lawmakers are still moving against abnormal filings, bad-faith registrations and trademark stockpiling detached from genuine business needs. For brand owners, the shift is bigger than a tougher slogan. The distance between filing strategy and real commercial use is getting harder to defend.

That matters because the practical issue has never been limited to a handful of headline-grabbing squatting cases. The deeper problem is the accumulation of marks filed in volume, spread across classes and parked for leverage, resale or future bargaining. If the second-review draft continues to compress that space, companies will have to revisit not only what they file, but also why they file it now, how broadly they file, and what evidence can support that decision later.

On June 19, 2026, Korea's Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP, formerly KIPO) released a mid-year supplement to its Examination Guidelines for AI-Related Inventions, responding to the rapid rise of AI-generated and AI-assisted R&D outputs. The practical question is no longer simply whether AI may be used in research. It is how examiners will separate inventorship from tool use when the claimed advance rests on fine-tuning, parameter retraining, domain adaptation, or the selective shaping of model outputs.

The signal from the supplement is fairly clear. South Korea is not moving toward recognizing the model itself as an inventor, but it is also not treating every AI-enabled result as a routine use of software. For applicants, the real task now is to explain human technical contribution with more discipline: who framed the problem, who designed the fine-tuning path, what technical judgments were made during adaptation, and which improvements can actually be supported by the specification.

The 7th All Africa Intellectual Property Summit has been confirmed for 11-13 November 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya, under the theme “Mainstreaming Intellectual Property for Africa’s Trade, Industrial and Creative Economy Transformation.” The phrasing matters. It does not treat intellectual property as a narrow question of registration or enforcement. It places IP back inside trade strategy, industrial policy and the business logic of creative sectors.

For companies watching Africa from the angles of brand building, licensing, content distribution, manufacturing partnerships or technology transfer, the summit is more than another conference date. It signals a harder policy turn: the conversation is moving from whether IP should be protected to how IP can operate as a practical asset within AfCFTA-era market integration. That is where the real commercial stakes begin.

Japan is starting to give the market a more workable answer on a question that has been hanging over virtual worlds for years: not every 3D digital asset in immersive spaces can safely rely on copyright alone. Virtual garments, architectural structures and other usable-looking assets may still qualify for copyright in some cases, but once the object looks less like pure artistic expression and more like a commercially exploitable design, rights holders may need to lean on the revised Design Act and adjacent enforcement tools instead.

The practical significance goes beyond classification. For platforms, game operators, UGC-space providers and brand owners, the bigger shift is procedural. When a complaint mixes copyright, design-like features and unfair competition logic, a platform hoping to stay within safe-harbour protection is under growing pressure to look at whether the notice actually explains the right asserted, the object being compared and the route of alleged infringement, rather than treating every takedown request as functionally equivalent.

Two copyright developments from 17 June deserve to be read together rather than separately. Uganda has formally passed its Copyright and Neighbouring Rights (Amendment) Bill, tightening penalties for digital infringement and piracy while placing stronger oversight on the collection and distribution of platform royalties. In Tunisia, the parliamentary legislative committee approved amendments to the national copyright law that would incorporate the Marrakesh Treaty’s copyright exceptions for blind and print-disabled persons into domestic law.

They move in different directions, but the policy signal is aligned. Copyright reform in Africa is no longer only about right recognition or conventional enforcement. It is now being pulled toward two harder questions: how to govern infringement and revenue flows in digital distribution, and how to modernise copyright exceptions in a way that is both internationally coherent and locally workable. For platforms, publishers, collecting societies and businesses that depend on digital circulation, that is a meaningful shift in regulatory centre of gravity.