On March 1 2019, the Japanese government announced that it submitted a bill to the Diet to amend the laws of patent, utility model, design and trademark. The major part of the amendment lies in the patent law and the design law. And we reported most of them in the previous articles. But we would like to pull them together here to show the outline of the amendment of Japanese patent law and design law for your reference. Patent Law Introduction of inspection procedure. Courts will be able to issue the inspection order, in response to the patent holder’s motion, by which neutral experts inspect the facility of the alleged infringer to […]

Japan may expand design protection beyond definition of ‘design’ in the design law. As previously reported, Japan has been discussing ‘design’ to strengthen the Japanese companies’ competitiveness since July 2017, and finally published the report on May 23 2018. From IP perspective, the report suggests amendment of the design law to address increasingly diverse ways of design under development of technologies. Specifically, the government will consider the expansion of the scope of protection of design to the following designs. Projection design that is design of image projected on a wall, the human body or the like Spatial design such as interior and exterior design of buildings or stores The Japanese […]