Singapore Intellectual Property: Registration of GUIs as Designs

The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) has issued a practice direction allowing the registration of  Graphical  User  Interfaces  (GUIs)  as  designs  under  the  Registered  Designs Act  (RDA) effective 11 December 2014. One of the requirements to qualify for registration of design in Singapore is industrial applicability. In order to satisfy this requirement, GUIs must […]

ASEAN – Comparison of Design Practices

Design laws vary by country. Some countries classify designs as patents and some have separate “registered design” or “industrial design” systems. In some countries, designs of products must be whole products in order to be registrable and not parts of products. Some countries allow protection of only part or parts of the product but the […]

ASEAN and India – The Importance of Industrial Design Protection

Of the four pillars of intellectual property protection – patents, industrial designs, trademarks and copyrights – perhaps the most overlooked is that for industrial (ornamental) designs. In most countries, the available design protection is generally very narrow, with a minimal halo of protection around the exact design depicted in the application. Why would an applicant […]

Thailand – Mediation Achieves Impressive Success Rate

Litigation in Thailand has often been stigmatised as lengthy, expensive, cumbersome and convoluted. Indeed, the weight of this fear burdens not so much the infringers of IP rights but, disproportionately more in fact, brand owners themselves.  Where litigation in Thailand has revealed many shortcomings, it has been cast away as commercially non-sensical for the protection […]

Latest Developments in Vietnam IP Law

The Vietnamese government has actively taken measures to ensure that the country’s IP laws are effective. They have recognized the relationship between economic development and IP protection. In fact the economic development in Vietnam is one of the most progressive one in Southeast Asia in terms of percentage growth of the GDP. So these IP […]