On 28 September 2015, the Directorate General of Intellectual Property (DGIP) officially launched the online application for the renewal of registered trademarks. This is surely a step forward for DGIP in making IP rights protection and maintenance more accessible to the public. The online application shortens the renewal process from the current period of at least 1 year to a maximum of 14 working days.
Archives for October 2015
[Business Today] The Recipe to Success…
By Geetha K.
The food and beverage industry is a booming one because, let’s face it, people need to eat. It is reported that food consumption in Malaysia has been growing at a rapid rate since the year 2000. Not only that, but with hankerings for different foods to suit different moods and palates becoming more and more discerning, competition in this industry is fierce.
Those who venture into the restaurant or F&B business – doing so out of a passion for food or as an entrepreneurial adventure – find that they are faced with many challenges that they may or may not anticipate, be it in the kitchen, or relating to finances, supplies, employees, décor, daily operations and so on, in addition to the pressure from market competitors.
[Read more…]
File or Fabricate: Which Comes First, the Patent Application or the Prototype?
By Joel Cheong
Consider the following fictitious scenario:
Eddy Sun is a seasoned engineer who developed a prototype of a self-powering cold fusion lamp for refrigerators in the 90s that provides both illumination and refrigeration effect, but due to management shelving the prototype in favour of eco-friendly refrigerants, a patent application for the prototype was only filed in early 2015.
Tetsu Lau is a brilliant college undergraduate who experienced a brief flash of ingenuity while intoxicated during a foam party and conceptualized a theoretically workable self-powering cold fusion lamp to keep his beer cold and stay on after the refrigerator door is closed. Sobering up days later, he filed an application for the invention, which was essentially the same as Eddy Sun’s, in late 2014.
The question now is this: To whom would the patent be granted?
[The Straits Times] How Asean countries fare in IP protection
Manchester Derby in Singapore Court
With many Southeast Asian countries being involved in tobacco farming, it is easy to see how trademark protection over cigarettes would be important in the region. Cigarette manufacturer Jamal Abdulnaser Mahmoud Al Mahamid (“the Plaintiff”) and Global Tobacco Manufacturers (International) Sdn. Bhd. (“the Defendant”) clearly exemplified this when they brought their dispute to the High Court of Singapore recently. Both of them registered trademarks for cigarettes in Singapore under the name “Manchester” (the Plaintiff in 2005, the Defendant in 2012).