The issue of Adwords has become increasingly important in trade mark law. When you buy a word from Google as an Adword, this has the effect that whenever anyone enters that word as a search term, your pop-up advert will appear on the screen together with the so-called ‘natural results’. You can buy generic words as Adwords, but you can also buy words that happen to be trade marks ...
Governor Perry recently signed four bills into law designed to combat Medicaid fraud, waste, and abuse. The bills are a mixed bag of enhanced enforcement capabilities for the state and a few new protections for healthcare providers. Most notably, the legislature made several changes to the Texas Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act (TMFPA), bringing the statute more in line with the federal False Claims Act. Changes to the Medicaid Fraud Laws On the enforcement side, S.B ...
On 26 June 2013, a new Commission Regulation on what telecommunications operators (Telcos) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should do if their customers' personal data is lost, stolen or otherwise compromised, was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. The purpose of the new rules is to ensure businesses, operating in more than one EU country, can take a pan-EU approach in the event of a data breach ...
The Commonwealth Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus QC, yesterday issued Terms of Reference requiring the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) to conduct an inquiry into the prevention of and remedies for serious invasions of privacy in the digital era ...
In Wyeth and Cordis Corp. v. Abbott Laboratories, 2012-1223, -1224 (Fed. Cir. June 26, 2013), the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendants, holding method of treatment claims invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 112(a) (2012) as not being enabled for their full scope. (Slip op. at 3) ...
On June 13, 2013, in the highly anticipated decision for Ass’n for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the Supreme Court shed some light on the future of genetic patenting to companies and scientists working in the personalized medicine and genetics industry. The personalized medicine industry seeks to revolutionize patient care by using genetic sequencing and testing to predict disease likelihood, severity, progression, and/or treatment response ...
You’ve seen all the articles about the Supreme Court’s decision in Assoc. for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics Inc. and the end of DNA patents, but what does this mean outside the biotech world? It means more insight into patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101. While Myriad does not affect business method and software patents, it is indicative of the general trend of the Supreme Court with respect to the threshold required to obtain a valid patent ...
In a March 2013 briefing* for business process outsourcing industry stakeholders, participants identified a number of risk factors for Philippine BPOs. On top of the list were talent retention and development, as well as the relative strength of the local currency that was viewed as exacerbating the issue of rising operating costs. Meanwhile, among priority “ecosystem” concerns were investment incentives and the legal and regulatory framework ...
It’s been well reported that the singer Rihanna has sued the UK retail chain Topshop for US$5 million in damages for the unauthorised use of her image on a t-shirt. Rihanna is apparently suing for passing-off, the argument being that people seeing the t-shirt are likely to assume that she has endorsed the brand. This may have got you wondering what the law is in South Africa on the issue of unauthorised endorsement ...
Domain names and trade marks are inextricably linked. The reason for this is simple – when a company needs to decide on a name at which it wants people to find it on the Internet, it generally opts for one of its own trade marks. As a result, the issues that crop up in trade mark disputes often crop up in domain name disputes too ...
The KZN High Court handed down a really interesting judgment in May 2013 in the case of Distell v KZN Wines & Spirits. The decision’s interesting because it not only looks at the issues that need to be considered in a trade mark infringement claim, but it also highlights the differences between trade mark infringement and passing off ...
In a decision that will likely have a significant impact on the pharmaceutical industry (and possibly broader implications for patent, antitrust, and high technology), the Supreme Court yesterday refused to exempt so-called reverse payment (or "pay for delay") patent settlements from antitrust scrutiny. Prior to yesterday’s ruling in FTC v. Actavis, Inc., 570 U.S. ___ (2013), most of the circuit courts to have considered the issue (i.e ...
Communications policy1 PolicySummarise the regulatory framework for the telecoms and media sector. What is the policymaking procedure? The laws and regulations put into place in the early to mid-1990s, and which still represent the core of local telecommunications law, are pro-competition and pro-access in tenor ...
The Supreme Court has unanimously upheld an arbitrator’s ruling that a contract that required arbitration of "any dispute" constituted an agreement to class-wide arbitration. The Court’s narrow ruling turns on the parties’ express agreement to allow the arbitrator to decide whether their contract, which contained an arbitration provision but did not mention class proceedings, authorized class arbitration ...
As discussed in our previous Alert, the French government has imposed Sunshine-like obligations on the pharmaceutical industry. Article 2 of Law No 2011-2012 of 29 December 2011 on the Strengthening of Health Protection for Medicinal and Health Products ("loi relative au renforcement de la sécurité sanitaire du médicament et des produits de santé" or "Loi Bertrand") inserted Articles L. 1453-1 in the French Code of Public Health ("Code de la santé publique" or "CSP"). Article L ...
As Panama became part of a number of industrial property related treaties, our internal laws have become more territorial; the use of a trademark is territorial again and registration becomes imperative for protection. Use as a Basis for Protection In Panama, as happens in most of the countries around the world, the right to register a trademark is acquired by its first use in commerce ...
Although we observed a increasingly widespread use of computer-based solutions in the cloud ( cloud computing ) in the information systems of companies and administrations, sometimes the obvious advantages it brings to the customer do not pay the necessary attention to the assessment of corporate risks that can generate its adoption ...
On May 28, 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a draft guidance entitled "Contract Manufacturing Arrangements for Drugs: Quality Agreements."1 The draft guidance describes FDA’s views on defining, establishing and documenting the responsibilities of parties that are involved in the contract manufacturing of drugs that are subject to current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) requirements ...
After the Netherlands, Slovakia, and the UK, it is now France’s turn to impose Sunshine-like obligations on the pharmaceutical industry. Soon, similar obligations will apply to all EU countries, after EFPIA, the European trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, adopts a code of conduct on disclosure of transfers of value between pharmaceutical companies and health care professionals or institutions ...
As of 15 May 2013, the most clicked legal resources from the SyCipLaw e-bulletins are:The International Comparative Legal Guide to: Telecoms, Media and Internet Laws 2013, Legal Bulletin: Technology, Media & Telecoms (Jan. 2013)The 2013 Foreign Investors' Guide to Real Estate Transactions in the Philippines ...
The Supreme Court’s recent decision has seeded another patent protection feather in Monsanto’s increasingly large cap, in addition to providing guidance on application of the patent exhaustion doctrine in the case of self-replicating technology. In Bowman v ...
The Federal Circuit released the results of its en banc hearing of a case involving the issue of what is patent eligible subject matter under section 101 of the Patent Act. (CLS Bank International v. Alice Corporation Pty. Ltd., F. 3d., Case No. 2011 1301 (May 9, 2013) ...
