Insights

Foreign brand owners regularly receive emails saying that a Chinese company is about to register their brand: as a .cn domain, as "internet keywords", or as a trademark. Small business owners ask about them in public forums all the time, usually with the same question: is this a scam or a real risk? Some of these emails are sales pitches dressed up as warnings. Others point to a real trademark application with a real deadline. This guide shows how to tell the difference yourself, using public databases, before you reply, pay or ignore it. It is general information; the current rules of the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) apply.

The international negotiations on a treaty for broadcasting organizations have inched forward again. WIPO's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) has issued two new documents: SCCR/49/3, dated 30 September, a revised Draft WIPO Broadcasting Organizations Treaty, and SCCR/49/4, dated 7 October, an accompanying "informal options paper" — both heading to the SCCR's 49th session in Geneva from 30 November to 4 December.

First, this is still a negotiating text, not an adopted treaty

That distinction matters.

On 9 October 2026 the US International Trade Commission (USITC) instituted investigation 337-TA-1526, brought by Vicor Corporation over vertical power delivery for AI servers. The 20 respondent entities include Luxshare, Foxconn and Quanta (news). Institution is not a finding of infringement, but a Section 337 case decides whether products can enter the US at all. That matters to foreign brands in two ways: products made for you in China can be caught by an exclusion order aimed at your supplier, and a registered US trademark or patent can be used to keep counterfeits out of the US. This guide explains how Section 337 works and what to do at each end. It describes general rules; check current USITC rules and US counsel for a specific case.

Thailand's Department of Intellectual Property (DIP) rolled out a handy new feature on 29 September: it has wired the Department of Business Development's (DBD) company-registration data into its official trademark search system, IP Search — so when you look up a trademark whose owner is a legal entity, you can check in the same place whether that company is still active, or has been dissolved, wound up, struck off or left dormant.

Winning the case — and walking away with $2. On 13 October, a Delaware federal jury found that chip-architecture firm Arm had breached its architecture licence agreement with Qualcomm and intentionally interfered with Qualcomm's business dealings with Meta, yet awarded Qualcomm just $2 in damages — $1 on each of the two claims it won.

Behind the $2 lie billions in licence fees

Don't be fooled by the figure.

The trade-secret fight between Apple and OpenAI just gained another twist. On 14 October, in a new filing in the Northern District of California (San Jose), OpenAI alleged that a former employee who left OpenAI for Apple had, on their last day, sent more than 100 confidential files relating to at least one unreleased device to personal accounts, and later presented the material to senior Apple executives.

A "mirror-image" case

The twist is that Apple sued first.