Posts in International

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Lisa Jorgenson, who is Deputy Director at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Jorgenson had just attended IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 and spoke on our final panel along with former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director David Kappos, former USPTO Director Andrei Iancu, and former International Trade Commission (ITC) Commissioner Scott Kieff. She joined me immediately following the conference at IPWatchdog Studios for a wide-ranging discussion that pulled back the curtain on an institution many in the IP community think they understand—but often do not really appreciate.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) today released its 2026 International IP Index, which flagged concerning trends about the “growing erosion of IP leadership” among the world’s high-performing economies, according to the report’s authors. In particular, the report noted that scores in eight EU Member States have declined this year, although the top ten rankings remained the same from 2025. The United States was again number one, with a relatively stable score of 95.15% compared with last year’s 95.17%.

Earlier today, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a blog post following up to a comment submitted by the Chamber late last week to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) urging the agency to rescind proposed price controls that would require pharmaceutical companies to offer drugs to Medicare on a “most-favored-nation” basis. The Chamber argues that applying foreign pricing controls on U.S. drug sales would have a deleterious impact on both American innovation and patient access to lifesaving treatments, and that such measures exceed CMS’ authority established by its governing statute.

A British consumers’ organization has withdrawn its competition claim against Qualcomm after it determined the Competition Appeal Tribunal was likely to find Qualcomm was not at fault.    The consumers’ organization, Which?, filed the claim in February 2021 on behalf of around 29 million British consumers, alleging that Qualcomm had “breached UK competition law by taking advantage of its dominance in the patent-licensing and chipset markets.”

In 1924, several changes were wrought to the format of the Olympic Games that remain permanent features more than a century later as the 2026 Winter Olympics take place in Milan Cortina. That year featured the first lodging for athletes in what would become the Olympic Village, the first radio broadcasts of live Olympic events, and the first edition of the Winter Olympics as a separate event for the summer games. Figure skating events were among the games introduced at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, and a century later, the international competition has been roiled by a series of copyright authorization issues leaving some skaters scrambling to change their routine and avoid infringement liability.

The UK Supreme Court today issued a landmark judgment on AI patentability that is likely to impact all software patents going forward. The decision in Emotional Perception v. Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks primarily held that the approach taken in Aerotel Ltd v Telco Holdings Ltd [2006] EWCA Civ 1371; [2007] Bus LR 634; [2007] RPC 7 (Aerotel) should no longer be followed. Under Aerotel, courts and examiners consider a four-step test for assessing whether a claim is excluded from patent eligibility: 1) properly construe the claim, 2) Identify the actual/ alleged contribution, 3) Ask whether the contribution is excluded and 4) check if the contribution is technical.

On Thursday, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) issued a joint report on IP and innovation in various industrial sectors of the European economy. Identifying IP-driven industries by analyzing registrations for IP rights within the EU, the agencies conclude that such industries contribute nearly half of the entire European gross domestic product (GDP) while also providing a third of the EU’s jobs, which offer workers larger wages on average when compared to total EU employment.

Yesterday, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the results of a joint study detailing the close connection between illicit trade in counterfeits and labor exploitation. The joint study shows clear, repeated associations between the intensity of counterfeit trade and abusive labor conditions, strongly suggesting that such conditions structurally enable the production and distribution of counterfeits.

On Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Trade convened a hearing titled Maintaining American Innovation and Technology Leadership, which explored a host of regulatory and other legal burdens being placed on tech industry trade by foreign governments to the detriment of American innovators and consumers. Among the panel witnesses at the subcommittee hearing was former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu, who spoke to several ways that our nation’s adversaries and trading partners alike are weakening American IP rights and how those issues should be addressed by U.S. policymakers.

Global litigation over standard essential patents (SEPs) is facing new strategies by implementers, mainly related to venue selection. There is an increasing risk of foreign decisions aimed at interfering with decisions on infringement of patents granted and issued in foreign jurisdictions – in clear tension with the territoriality principle. There is also a trend of abuse of process in the selection of venues within specific countries aimed at creating obstacles and delaying remedies and effective protection for national IP rights.

This year saw a world in which many employees had forms of Generative AI (GenAI) at their fingertips, either in the workplace or on their personal devices, and a world in which organizations continued to face unprecedented levels of cyber risk as they continued their digital transformation journeys. While data breach litigation is not new and tales of company confidential information being copied and pasted into open GenAI tools have haunted employers for what feels like years, trade secret issues arising from data breaches and GenAI use were not really trending issues in the courts in 2025. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, equitable and contractual duties of confidence lay at the heart of the few cases involving trade secrets that were considered by the UK courts in 2025, with directors being under the microscope and the courts again grappling with issues around the identification and particularization of the confidential information at issue.

It’s been a year of significant decisions from the Unified Patent Court (UPC), from both the first instance Local Divisions (LDs) and Central Division (CD) and the Court of Appeal (CoA).  Jurisdiction and, as more appellate decisions become available, the substantive law on patent validity and infringement, have come into focus. Decisions relating to enforcement also provide helpful indications for the future. 

In a Progress Statement published Monday, the UK Government said that its ongoing consultation on copyright and AI has drawn over 11,500 responses, 10,112 of which were submitted via an online survey service, and that 88% of those who responded online supported requiring licenses to use copyrighted works for AI training in all cases.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) today released its second edition of the WIPO Pulse comprehensive survey, titled “Global intellectual property perception survey 2025,” analyzing the perceptions of intellectual property of 35,500 respondents in 74 countries that represent approximately 80% of the target population aged 18 to 65 worldwide between February 20 and April 25.

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO’s) new Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, adopted in May 2024, would impose additional disclosure obligations on patent applicants under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). Specifically, it would require disclosure of traditional knowledge and genetic resources even when those details have no bearing on patentability.