Following reports of a considered revision to the Japanese Patent Act to enable “discovery” of data on patent infringement earlier this year, the proposal has been officially made. A patent attorney’s informational meeting on July 23, 2019, gave explanation. The…
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In June of 2019, the Japanese Fair Trade Commission (kousei torihiki iinkai, FTC) reported that in its survey results from about 16,000 small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing (the Commissioned surveyed 30,000), there were over 700 reported cases of larger client…
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Under the “Act to Revise a part of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act (May 30, 2018 Article 33)”, the JPO has greatly simplified the existing procedure to reduce fees, for the purpose of helping small and micro entities. As previously,…
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Japanese fashion brand ISSEY MIYAKE announced on June 13 that it is filing a Petition for a provisional injunction against a Japanese rival shop, BARCOS, for a handbag it claims is too similar in design to its own BAO BAO…
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JASRAC (Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers), the music licensing corporation that manages copyright for a vast swath of music in Japan, continues its fight against unlicensed use of music it controls. On May 13, 2019, it…
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Toyota Motor Corporation announced in Tokyo on April 8 that it would be releasing its patents related to hybrid vehicle (HV) technologies, totaling over 23,000 patents, for free use up to 2030. These patents relate to the motor, power control…
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In 2018 Tasuku Honjo, a professor at Kyoto Univeristy, was awarded a Nobel Prize along with other researchers for developments of cancer-fighting technologies. The protein Honjo found in immune cells, programmed death receptor 1 (PD-1), was found to be a…
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As mentioned in an earlier article, the imperial period name may not be trademarked on its own but may only be registered in a trademark when combined with other elements in a way that can be distinctive. The new imperial…
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* See an update on the situation from 2020. The Republic of Korea (“South Korea”)’s courts expanded precedent for financial punishment of Japanese companies on March 25, 2019, when it approved a takeover of six patents and two trademarks worth…
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Japan, seeking to keep with the challenges that digital reproduction makes for copyright infringement prevention, has been aiming to bring the law more to bear on downloaders of pirated materials online. This comes in the wake of the Mangamura manga…
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