Insights

During the INTA Annual Meeting held from 2 to 6 May, WIPO presented a new digital management environment, with eMadrid placed at the centre of a more guided filing experience. The upgraded environment is expected to support smarter classification suggestions and automated risk searches, giving applicants an earlier warning when goods and services descriptions may trigger provisional refusals in designated Madrid members.

The practical message is plain: a cleaner filing record is becoming part of the applicant’s own responsibility, not just an issue for later examination. Companies using the Madrid System should review specifications against the base mark and the likely practice of key target offices before filing, rather than relying on post-filing corrections. WIPO’s reference to a transparency labelling plan aligned with the EU AI Act also points to a broader shift, where AI-assisted IP administration will increasingly need visible disclosure, traceability and compliance controls.

China’s National Intellectual Property Administration, together with the Ministry of Public Security and the State Administration for Market Regulation, has rolled out an action plan to make 2026 a nationwide “Year of Rectification and Standardization” for the intellectual property agency industry. The plan goes beyond another short enforcement push: it targets bad-faith patent and trademark filings, unlicensed practice, certificate lending, falsified materials, improper client solicitation, and weak gatekeeping at the approval and recordal stages, while also tying in credit-based and data-driven supervision.

The practical message is that agency regulation in China is becoming more continuous and more granular. Firms that still rely on volume-driven filing, loose internal controls, aggressive marketing language, or questionable staffing arrangements may find that those weaknesses are easier to detect and harder to explain away. For businesses using external agents, cheaper is no longer safer by default; the quality of compliance, signature responsibility, and recordal hygiene now matters much more than before.

South Korea officially launched its pan-government one-stop reporting platform for overseas infringement on April 27, creating a single channel for Korean brands facing malicious trademark filings, counterfeits and online infringement in foreign markets. By bringing together customs, police and diplomatic resources, the platform is designed to shorten the distance between a complaint and an actual enforcement response.

That is more than an administrative update. For many K-Brands expanding abroad, the harder part has never been identifying the problem but moving quickly across borders once the problem appears. A unified reporting gateway could help reduce that lag, especially in cases involving online takedowns, counterfeit distribution and bad-faith filings. Still, the platform will work best for companies that have already done the basic homework: early trademark filings, clear ownership records and evidence capture. Without that, even a faster channel can only do so much.

IPOS has launched a feedback exercise on the UK Supreme Court’s Emotional Perception ruling, with submissions open from 17 April to 14 May 2026. The official questions go well beyond whether the UK case is merely interesting. IPOS is asking whether the decision is relevant to Singapore patent practice, whether it brings greater clarity to patentable subject matter and its interaction with inventive step, and what practical issues the approach could create for applicants and practitioners.

That is why this development deserves more attention than a routine consultation notice. Singapore is not changing its rules yet, but it is openly revisiting a pressure point that matters to AI companies: should ANN-related inventions continue to face heavy filtering at the subject-matter stage, or should more of the debate move toward technical character, technical effect and inventive step? For applicants working on accelerators, inference optimisation, edge deployment, signal processing and AI system architecture, that distinction can affect drafting strategy, fallback claim structure and prosecution cost.

As the EU AI Act moves deeper into its staged implementation, the compliance focus around general-purpose AI models is shifting from abstract policy debate to operational proof. The Commission has already issued the template for the public summary of training content for GPAI models, and the follow-on consultation on machine-readable text-and-data-mining opt-out protocols has pushed copyright compliance closer to the level of technical standards, logging practices and evidence design.

That is why the market conversation is no longer just about whether AI providers can rely on broad training assumptions. The harder question is whether they can explain where training data came from, how rights reservations were identified, and what records exist to show that exclusions, licences and updates were actually respected. On the rightsholder side, the issue is equally strategic: the value lies not only in suing later, but in expressing rights reservations, licensing terms and evidentiary timestamps in forms that machines, regulators and counterparties can all work with.

In his message for World Intellectual Property Day on April 26, 2026, Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) Director-General John Asein confirmed that the Federal Executive Council has approved the country’s first-ever National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy, giving Nigeria a unified national framework for IP protection, commercialization and institutional coordination. At the same time, the NCC said it is intensifying enforcement under the Copyright Act 2022 against illegal streaming, cable piracy and unauthorized public exhibitions, with sports broadcasting rights moving closer to the center of its enforcement agenda.