Intellectual property rights have become increasingly valuable assets for many companies and often are critical to a company’s competitive capability. Therefore, it has become crucial for companies to secure ownership in IP assets created by employees in the course of their employment. In spite of this, many companies have overlooked this issue and failed to ensure that necessary agreements are put in place and that employees are properly informed of their rights and obligations with respect to IP assets created while working at the company and after termination of their employment.

This article describes the enforcement campaign being pursued by SKF in an attempt to rid the Thai market of counterfeit bearings, which pose a serious risk to consumer safety.

By examining a major seizure of counterfeit Casio and Citizen products, this article offers insight into a new method being used by infringers to attempt to circumvent customs procedures.

This article provides a brief update on the filing of applications under the Protection of Geographical Indications Act.

Members of the Tilleke & Gibbins IP enforcement team have recently con­ducted several training sessions for police and customs officials in differ­ent cities, at ports of entry, and at border cross­ings. The training focused on methods of identifying and differen­tiating between genuine and counter­feit goods and also reiterated the importance of coop­eration between government authorities and brand owners in the suppression of coun­terfeiting in Thailand. This article describes the training sessions and the benefits they yield for IP rights owners.

The Supreme Court of Thailand recently pronounced its decision to uphold an appeal in a long-running patent battle between two Korean-owned companies in Thailand. The parties to this conflict compete with each other in manufacturing rubber products, such as rubber gloves and boots. The dispute arose because one company attempted to register a famous rubber boot product for use in agriculture to be exclusively owned as a design patent in Thailand. The other company had not filed for protection of the subject product because it had been used in Korea for a long time.

A concurrent use registration is the registration of a mark already registered by another party based on the assertion that the new registration can coexist with the existing one. Although Thai law allows for such registrations in certain circumstances, the Registrar and the Board of Trademarks are generally reluctant to apply this concept. Recently, however, an important decision by the Central Intellectual Property and International Trade Court clearly implemented a concurrent use registration, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in Thailand.

In 2002, Thailand adopted the Trade Secrets Act, which contains a provision intended to safeguard the confidenti­ality of marketing approval data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Nevertheless, the scope of the protection afforded by the Act would remain uncertain until ministerial regulations were adopted which would enable its implementa­tion. This article analyzes the ministerial regulation and the current view of the FDA.