Insights

In early July 2026, the French signal is not just about counterfeit goods showing up at summer fairs. It is broader than that. Trade fairs, tourism season, online copying, platform visibility and cross-border brand exposure are all colliding at once. Read against the deeper cooperation framework between the INPI and French Customs, this is becoming a more integrated enforcement environment in which exhibitors, online sellers, right holders and advisers all face a shorter reaction window.

For many innovative brands from Asia and other non-European markets, the pressure point is especially clear. The problem is no longer limited to lookalike products at a booth. Product visuals, brochures, videos, landing pages, social clips, copied display concepts and opportunistic local trademark filings can all appear around the same commercial moment. Once offline exposure and online amplification begin together, delay becomes expensive very quickly.

On 29 June, the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) signalled a practical shift in how Germany-linked international registrations may be handled after post-registration changes. Where a Madrid or Hague registration designating Germany later undergoes a change of name, address or ownership, the German-side recordal and downstream handling are expected to move more quickly than many right holders have been used to. For companies managing international portfolios, the real frustration has often not been whether a change can be recorded at WIPO, but how long it takes before the German side becomes reliably usable for follow-on action.

This is more than a back-office IT story. For businesses in the middle of European restructurings, post-closing transfers, intra-group consolidations or licensing clean-up projects, a shorter administrative lag changes filing calendars, evidence planning and even the order in which transaction documents and external notices are prepared. What looks like a technical upgrade may end up reshaping how Germany is managed inside Madrid and Hague portfolios.

On 30 June, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) drew a sharper line around what counts as genuine use of an EU trade mark in the platform economy. The dispute came out of long-running revocation proceedings and focused on a point many brand owners have quietly leaned on for years: if products remain listed on cross-border marketplaces, the store page can be reached from across the Union, and a handful of EU orders do come through, is that enough to resist a non-use attack against an EUTM?

The Court’s message is uncomfortable, but clear. Pan-EU accessibility is not the same thing as genuine use in the Union. What still matters is whether the online activity actually creates or preserves a commercial presence in the relevant market. If real sales remain sparse, occasional and confined to a very small Member State market, the proprietor may struggle to justify keeping a right that covers the whole EU. That is a more demanding message than many online-first businesses have been working with.

On 2 July, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) moved a practical question to the centre of design filing strategy: when an applicant submits visuals produced with generative AI, can it still show that a human being meaningfully shaped the final design? For applicants relying heavily on outputs from tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, that question is no longer theoretical. It now goes directly to filing resilience.

The new guidance does not shut the door on AI-assisted design work. What it does is draw a firmer line around applications that look like “prompt in, image out, file immediately”. Where the visual representations are generated almost entirely by an AI tool and the applicant cannot show substantial human intervention, selection, revision or finishing work, the filing is more likely to attract objections on authorship, entitlement and evidential credibility. The UKIPO is not really policing the use of AI as such; it is testing whether there is enough provable human creative control behind the design that reaches the register.

WIPO’s new City of Innovation award turned the end of June into a real policy deadline for cities, not just a communications moment. For the 2026 edition, applications closed on June 30, each member state could forward no more than three cities, and submissions had to move through diplomatic channels rather than go straight from city hall to WIPO. That design forces cities to present innovation, creativity and IP as an integrated public strategy instead of a loose collection of projects.

For the Middle East, especially the Gulf, the timing is unusually good. Cities in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia already have visible narratives around creative economy, startup infrastructure, industrial upgrading and research commercialization. WIPO has not yet published the applicant list, so the key question is not who has already won. It is which cities can most convincingly translate existing innovation ambition into a credible IP-backed urban pledge for the next 12 months.

Israel’s 2026 patent fee schedule is now being applied in practice, and the change is broader than a routine tariff update. The filing fee, excess-claim fee and later renewal tranches now sit in clearer view at the start of the prosecution timeline, forcing applicants to think earlier about claim count, drafting scope and whether Israel is still a priority market at national-phase entry.

The more important message in July 2026 is procedural. Israel continues to apply a hard 30-month deadline for PCT national-phase entry, and that applies under both Article 22 and Article 39 routes. Recent operational uncertainty has not turned that rule into a de facto 31-month system. Rights can in principle be reinstated after a miss, but the remedy remains narrow in practice and should be treated as emergency relief, not ordinary docketing flexibility.