Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry uploaded an article on its homepage stating that “JPO announces that the Cabinet has approved the Bill for the Act of Partial Revision of the Patent Act. On March 1, 2019, the bill will be submitted to the ongoing 198th ordinary session of the Diet.” According to the article, the Partial Revision of the Patent Act includes “Creation of a new system under which neutral technological experts conduct on-site inspections of suspected infringers” and “Review of the method of calculating compensations for damages”.

A Japanese court handed down stiff penalties against three operators of a so-called leech site that facilitated piracy of copyrighted content.

The copyright term in Japan will be extended from 50 years to 70 years (effective on December 30).

Toray Industries, Inc., who possesses a patent covering an antipruritic agent “Nalfurafine”, sued generic companies, Sawai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. and Fuso Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd., for patent infringement to the Tokyo District Court on December 13 to seek an injunction against the production, etc. of their products.

Because the patent relates to second medical use of known compounds and the term of the patent has been extended, one of the issues of this case is the scope of an extended patent right of a second medicinal use invention, on which issue no court decision has been made yet.

Nintendo posted “Nintendo Game Content Guidelines for Online Video & Image Sharing Platforms” on its official website on November 29.

In the official website, it is announced “As long as you follow some basic rules, we will not object to your use of gameplay footage and/or screenshots captured from games for which Nintendo owns the copyright (“Nintendo Game Content”) in the content you create for appropriate video and image sharing sites. To help guide you, we prepared the following guidelines:” (Nintendo website).

SoftBank Robotics obtained a three-dimensional trademark of “Pepper”, the famous humanoid robot with a tablet over its chest.

[Design at issue]

[Key issue]

“Publicly known” (Article 3, paragraph (2) of the Design Act)

Court ruled that in order to fall under the terms “publicly known,” the fact of being actually known to an unspecified or large number of people in Japan or a foreign country prior to the filing of the application for design registration was required.