Insights

On November 11, 2025, the Maldives enacted the Trademark Act (Law 19/2025), which is scheduled to take effect on November 11, 2026. Compared with the country’s earlier reliance on cautionary notices to signal trademark claims, the new law introduces a structured framework for filing, examination, publication, opposition, registration, renewal and cancellation. In practical terms, this is a shift from informal notice-based protection toward procedural title-based protection.

Although the headline is about trademark legislation, the implications are broader for companies watching packaging, product appearance and design-related market entry. The Maldives Intellectual Property Office Act has already laid the institutional groundwork, and because the Maldives is not yet part of the Paris Convention or the Hague System, the way this new framework is implemented may matter well beyond trademarks alone.

WIPO’s March 2026 PCT Newsletter highlighted a cluster of procedural developments that deserve close practical attention. Beyond the extension of certain PCT-PPH pilots, three updates stand out for their operational impact: the Patent and Trademark Office of San Marino will become both a depositing and an accessing Office of the WIPO Digital Access Service (DAS) from 1 May 2026; the National Patent Office of Bahrain will begin receiving and processing international applications in electronic form via ePCT-Filing from 1 October 2026; and the Indonesian Culture Collection (InaCC), under Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency, has held the status of International Depositary Authority under the Budapest Treaty since 24 February 2026.

At first glance, these developments may look like separate technical notices. In reality, they point in the same strategic direction: the effectiveness of the PCT system increasingly depends not only on harmonized treaty rules, but also on the quality of its procedural infrastructure for priority document exchange, digital filing, and internationally recognized biological material deposits. For companies, research institutions and patent counsel, these changes may not alter patentability standards overnight, but they can materially affect filing readiness, evidence management and cross-border execution.

India’s trade mark system has opened an important new front for non-traditional brand protection. The Indian Trade Marks Registry has accepted for advertisement an application covering a rose scent applied to tyres, a move widely described as the country’s first smell mark to clear this stage. What makes the case especially notable is not merely the scent itself, but the applicant’s use of a scientific image that maps the odour into a seven-dimensional smell space in order to address the long-standing requirement of graphical representation.

That development matters well beyond one unusual filing. For years, scent marks have stalled in many jurisdictions not simply because offices dislike them, but because applicants struggle to define them in a way that is clear, stable, intelligible, and enforceable. India’s willingness to advertise this application suggests that a new evidentiary pathway may be emerging: combine scientific reproducibility with trade mark distinctiveness, and an otherwise elusive sign may become legally discussable in a much more concrete way.

From January 1, 2026, China’s revised Patent Examination Guidelines move same-day dual filing out of the realm of informal filing tactics and back into a tightly structured statutory exception. According to CNIPA’s official interpretation issued on December 4, 2025, where the same applicant files both an invention patent application and a utility model application for the same invention-creation on the same filing date, the applicant must make a same-day double-filing declaration at the filing stage for each application. If that declaration is missing, the invention application may still be rejected under Article 9.1 of the Patent Law once CNIPA discovers that a corresponding utility model right has already been granted.

What matters even more is that the revision largely closes off a common assumption in practice: that an applicant who failed to declare at filing might later rescue the invention case by abandoning the already granted utility model. For companies, patent firms, and cross-border filing teams that have relied on China’s dual-track protection logic, this is not just a procedural reminder. It is a rule change that can directly affect filing timing, disclosure discipline, instruction management, and portfolio design.

On March 23, China’s National Intellectual Property Administration joined the Ministry of Public Security and the State Administration for Market Regulation at a press briefing to disclose the phased results of a special campaign targeting unlawful conduct in the patent and trademark agency sector. Since November 2025, authorities have focused on seven categories of misconduct, including fabricated applicants, leasing or lending professional qualifications, and improper client solicitation. Within three months, 61 patent and trademark agencies and 22 patent attorneys had been subjected to penalties including business suspension and revocation, while enforcement also extended to online advertising cleanup, platform account controls, and criminal investigation of related cases.

What makes the campaign more significant is that it no longer looks like a narrow enforcement burst aimed at a handful of bad actors. Official figures indicate that self-inspection and rectification covered more than 50,000 agencies; 187 patent agencies and 1,279 branch offices were removed or cleaned up; nearly 10,000 trademark agencies that failed identity verification were restricted from handling business; and 1.736 million abnormal patent e-filing accounts were cleared. For corporate IP teams, agencies, and platform operators, the key 2026 question is no longer whether scrutiny will continue, but how compliance, personnel control, account governance, and client-acquisition models will be redefined.

On March 19, 2026, the U.S. Copyright Office announced in NewsNet that it would publish a proposed rule in the Federal Register to seek public comment on adjustments to its fee schedule. The proposed rule was published on March 20, 2026, and written comments are due by May 4, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time. The notice launches a new round of public debate over the pricing of copyright registration, recordation, and related administrative services.

This is not simply a routine pricing update. The Office explained that it reviews and updates fees every few years, with the last adjustment adopted in 2020. Since then, inflation and rising operating costs have widened the gap between user fees and the cost of delivering services. The current proposal is designed to restore overall cost recovery to roughly 60 percent, a level the Office describes as broadly consistent with historical practice. Just as important, the Office signaled that it plans to separately seek comment on tiered or subscription-style fee models in the future, suggesting that the long-term debate may extend well beyond the dollar amounts in the present rulemaking.