Insights

On May 9, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released the pre-publication version of Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training. The report does not endorse either extreme. It does not say all AI training is infringement, and it does not offer a blanket fair use safe harbor. Instead, it pushes the analysis back to the facts that matter: what was copied, how the material was obtained, whether licensing markets exist, and how the use affects rightsholders in practice. For AI companies, that is a meaningful shift. Large-scale scraping is now much harder to frame as a neutral technical step.

The practical takeaway is even sharper. The Office discusses terms of use, robots.txt, metadata, watermarking, and other ways for rightsholders to signal that their material should not be used for AI training. It also notes that voluntary opt-out measures can have merit. Once those signals become more standardized and machine-readable, developers who ignore them, or who rely on pirated or unlawfully accessed material, will have a more difficult time defending their conduct as fair use. The question is no longer whether opt-out language matters. It is whether companies can prove that their data intake systems actually recognize and respect it.

For applicants entering Canada from the PCT route with an AI system listed as the sole inventor in the international phase, CIPO’s current national-phase guidance, compliance framework and the latest Canadian inventorship position now point in the same direction. A pure AI inventor designation is not going to carry a case smoothly into Canada. If inventor details, entitlement statements or applicant status do not line up with what Canadian law requires, the file is likely to run into a compliance notice before anything else moves very far.

The practical importance of this development is wider than the familiar headline that “Canada does not accept AI as an inventor.” The more useful lesson is procedural. National phase entry is becoming a poor place to discover that inventorship was treated too loosely in the international stage. For AI-heavy filings, applicants need to identify the natural person or persons who actually contributed to the inventive concept, organize entitlement documents earlier, and leave room to cure defects without derailing filing strategy or examination timing.

As the 2026 WIPO-EUIPO IP Management Clinic for green and sustainability-focused SMEs approaches its 10 June application deadline, a clearer support map is emerging for green-tech companies in the EU, EFTA countries and Ukraine. WIPO says the program will help selected businesses work on IP identification, protection, commercialization and international growth, while the EUIPO’s 2026 SME Fund continues to show where the filing tools sit in practice: 75% reimbursement for EU-level and national or regional trade mark and design fees, and 50% reimbursement for basic application, designation and subsequent designation fees for trade marks and designs outside the EU when filed through WIPO. For smaller companies trying to take climate-tech, clean-energy or sustainability products abroad, IP is starting to look less like a back-office formality and more like part of market-entry planning.

The acceleration piece is also real, but it is not a special green lane. Under the EUIPO’s current Fast Track conditions, compliant EU trade mark applications can reach publication in half the time or less than regular filings, and EU design filings can also use an accelerated Fast Track route. That said, speed still depends on filing discipline, classification choices and payment conditions, and as of late May 2026 the EUIPO has already stated that Voucher 2 for trade marks and designs is unavailable for new applications because funds have been exhausted. That is probably the clearest practical message here: green-tech SMEs should decide earlier which brands, product appearances and target markets matter most, because the support toolkit exists, but the window does not always stay open.

Editor’s note (24 September 2026): as of publication we have not located an official announcement of the measures described below; this article is based on industry briefings and is subject to official confirmation.

The package on priority examination in designated technology fields newly released by Korea's Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP, formerly KIPO) does two things at once for AI patent filers. It moves “AI large-model architecture” and “embodied-intelligence control algorithms” into the top priority review lane, and it reshapes the fee logic around that lane. Where the application is prepared cleanly and the fast-track basis is substantiated from the outset, a first office action could realistically arrive in roughly three months.

The more strategic move is the new fee incentive. Applicants that file with a detailed explanation of the lawful open-source basis of the training dataset, or documentary proof that the relevant permissions are properly licensed, may obtain a 15% reduction in the official priority-examination fee. That turns data provenance from a background compliance issue into something that can affect filing cost, filing timing and even which inventions are ready to be pushed forward first.

After months of systems integration, WIPO says Madrid eFiling now includes a “smart designation and refusal warning” support module for key ASEAN designations, with market attention centering on Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. When applicants select those territories, the tool is designed to pull from the latest examination databases of the relevant IP Offices and return a real-time risk rating for issues that may trigger absolute-ground objections, such as terms that lack distinctiveness in the local language, expressions with potentially adverse connotations, or wording that sits too close to locally sensitive prohibitions.

The point is not that software can replace substantive examination in each designated country. It cannot. The practical shift is that a class of risk that used to surface only months after filing is now being pushed into the designation stage itself. For applicants using the Madrid System to enter ASEAN markets, that creates a more useful early choice: revise the mark first, narrow the goods and services, or rethink whether a national filing strategy backed by local clearance would be safer. For advisers, the message is equally clear. ASEAN designations are becoming less of a box-ticking exercise and more of a localized assessment of language, culture and absolute-ground exposure from day one.

IP Australia’s latest final consultation summary on the exposure draft for design law implementation points in a clear direction: protection for partial designs is moving closer to reality in Australia. The Office has already said it intends to progress reform so that applicants can protect part of a physical product, as part of a broader effort to make the design system more accessible and less cumbersome. For brand owners and product design teams, this is not a cosmetic adjustment. It goes to the level at which design rights can be carved out, how product families can be protected, and where enforcement arguments may become more focused.

The more commercially important signal is the one for Hague users. The summary indicates a more settled approach for international applications designating Australia, including the expected use of broken lines to disclaim unclaimed portions and a stronger alignment of view-submission practice with standards already used by WIPO’s International Bureau. If that approach is carried through into legislation and implementing rules, applicants using one set of drawings across multiple jurisdictions should face fewer Australia-specific objections or correction requests at the national stage. In practical terms, Australia appears to be moving not only toward broader subject-matter protection, but toward a design filing framework that is easier to integrate into global portfolio management.