Insights

On June 26, the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) publicly warned businesses against a UK-linked outfit calling itself “Crown Mark”. The pitch was familiar in one sense and more sophisticated in another: a third party was supposedly about to file the recipient’s brand, and only urgent paid action could stop the damage. IPOPHL said it has no official relationship with that entity at all.

At almost the same moment, a second signal from the Philippines became harder to ignore. IPOPHL has been pressing for updates to the IP Code and related rules as technology changes faster, while AI strategy, valuation tools and guidance around digital and AI-linked assets move higher on the policy agenda. Read together, the message is broader than fraud prevention. It is about procedural discipline, ownership clarity and commercial readiness.

By 24 June 2026, practitioner commentary around Indonesia’s latest DGIP reforms had largely converged on three points. On the patent side, Regulation No. 6 of 2026 finally carries the amended Patent Law into day-to-day filing practice by expressly extending protectable subject matter to systems, methods, and uses. On the trade mark side, Regulation No. 5 of 2026 is widely being read as a serious speed reform, with key official outputs compressed to extremely short timelines and renewal handling now measured in working days rather than months.

The bigger story is that these changes do not operate in isolation. For AI, software, and platform-facing businesses entering Indonesia, broader patentable subject matter, the requirement to pay excess-claim fees on filing, faster trade mark processing, and a blocking mechanism aimed at e-commerce and social-media content are now pushing on the same set of business decisions. Filing order, budget control, evidence preparation, and enforcement planning all need to move earlier.

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.