Insights

On 7 September 2026, IP Australia updated its trademark examination practice guidance to clarify how evidence of genuine commercial use should be assessed in non-use removal proceedings. For cross-border sellers, the practical message is that merely showing a mark on an international e-commerce platform or proving that a website was accessible from Australia may carry limited weight on its own. Evidence such as Australian-dollar pricing or payment, orders and shipping records to Australian addresses, and marketing directed specifically at Australian consumers is more likely to demonstrate a real commercial connection with the Australian market.

The shift raises the importance of evidence management for overseas brand owners. Businesses relying on e-commerce sales to support Australian registrations should preserve transaction, fulfilment, payment and locally targeted advertising records in a way that forms a consistent timeline. Where the record consists mainly of global website visibility without Australian transactions or market-facing activity, defending a non-use removal action is likely to become more difficult.

South Korea’s Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP) announced on 10 September 2026 that it is broadening its Super Fast-Track examination framework for strategic technologies, extending coverage to areas including AI edge-computing chips, on-device large-model architectures and neuromorphic chips. Under MOIP’s current 2026 framework, eligible cases are targeted for a first examination result in about one month, making the route materially faster than ordinary examination and reinforcing the government’s push to secure rights around technologies with short product and investment cycles.

For AI-chip companies, the practical value is not just procedural speed. Earlier clarity on Korean patent rights can support fundraising, licensing and supply-chain negotiations, while also helping applicants sequence foreign family filings around core architectures. The trade-off is that accelerated review does not relax novelty, inventive-step or disclosure standards. Applicants using the route should therefore enter with claims and specifications already structured around architecture, on-device inference optimisation and neuromorphic implementations, rather than treating speed as a substitute for claim quality.

On 11 September 2026, the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS), together with relevant digital-governance bodies, issued updated practical guidance on generative-AI content creation and copyright responsibility for digital platforms. The guidance further clarifies the operational conditions platforms should satisfy when relying on copyright safe-harbour protections, including machine-readable and rapid notice-and-takedown processes. It also offers more specific industry guidance on how existing copyright exceptions may apply when protected works are used in large-model training.

For AI developers and online platforms, the immediate issue is less about a new blanket permission than about process and evidence. Training-data provenance, licensing status, lawful-access grounds and complaint-handling records will need to be easier to trace and explain, while platforms may face greater pressure to show that notices can be received, assessed and acted on in a consistent workflow. The guidance therefore points toward a more integrated compliance model: copyright clearance, data governance and platform response procedures should be designed together rather than treated as separate tasks after a dispute arises.

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.

In a hearing decision published on 7 September 2026, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) rejected an attempt to secure exclusive trademark rights over the names of several modern historical inventors and generic concepts drawn from commercial history. The applications covered Class 41 education and video entertainment production services and Class 9 downloadable digital content. The tribunal accepted the opponent’s case that famous historical figures, events and foundational invention names drawn from the public historical record may lack inherent distinctiveness when used in this way, while exclusivity could also impede documentary makers, educators and other content producers from making necessary descriptive references. On the facts, the filing strategy was also found to involve bad faith.

The decision is a useful reminder that trademark law is not a tool for fencing off shared historical vocabulary. Applicants may still build brands around historical themes, but the closer a sign sits to material that creators need to describe facts, people or established inventions, the harder it becomes to justify broad exclusive control. The ruling should therefore matter to both rights owners and media businesses: defensive filings aimed primarily at blocking ordinary historical reference are likely to face closer scrutiny, especially where distinctiveness is weak and the commercial rationale appears secondary to exclusion.

On 8 September 2026, the Munich Local Division of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) issued a ruling in a patent infringement dispute involving digital audiovisual processing equipment that further clarifies how security may be set when EPO opposition proceedings run in parallel with a UPC preliminary injunction (PI) action. The approach reflected in the decision is that the court may look beyond the claimant’s solvency and the defendant’s potential loss, and factor the patent’s vulnerability in the parallel opposition into the amount of security required. Where detailed prior-art material points to a high risk of revocation, the security needed to maintain interim relief may rise materially in order to protect the defendant against losses if the injunction is later lifted.

The practical effect is to bring patent-validity risk forward into the interim-relief stage. A patentee seeking a PI may need not only a strong urgency and infringement case, but also a more robust validity record and a realistic assessment of the cash cost of higher security. For defendants, well-developed prior-art and EPO opposition submissions may influence both whether interim relief is granted and the financial conditions attached to it. Security should still be understood as a risk-allocation device rather than a standalone penalty, but where the parallel validity challenge appears unusually strong, the UPC is signalling greater caution before allowing one side to obtain a potentially market-shaping cross-border injunction ahead of a final validity determination.

Congress has approved H.R. 6500, extending the USPTO's America Invents Act fee-setting authority through 11 December 2026. Without congressional action, that authority would have expired after 15 September. The short extension removes the immediate risk of a statutory gap and gives lawmakers several more months to decide whether the Office should retain longer-term flexibility to set patent and trademark fees.

The more consequential issue is what Congress may demand in return. At a 2 September House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, lawmakers and witnesses tied the renewal debate to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's use of discretionary denial in proceedings such as inter partes review. Fee authority and PTAB institution policy are legally distinct, but the approaching sunset has created leverage. A longer renewal could therefore become a vehicle for procedural guardrails, reporting duties or other limits on how discretionary denial is applied.