In today’s fast-moving and highly competitive commercial environment, brand owners must ensure that their advertisements, while fulfilling their roles of promoting brands and increasing public recognition of products and services, do not violate any relevant laws or regulations. While this might seem straightforward and simple, advertising today can be a challenging task, and with advertisements instantly transmitted countrywide, failure to operate within the law can have consequences on a huge scale.

While we’ve all seen how quickly life has changed during the pandemic, from a business and HR angle the possibility of intellectual property misappropriation and theft occasioned by work-from-home policies may not yet be clear to many. With many employees working outside their company’s normal IT security fence, their increased use of their own computers and devices instead of those in their offices with standard or enhanced security mechanisms has made it more challenging for employers to control access to key business information.

Cambodia is set to become the latest member of the Berne Convention—the key international treaty governing copyright and related rights—following a law passed on June 27, 2020, ratifying the convention and authorizing the government to take steps to implement it.

While the Indonesian government already has the power to exercise compulsory licensing through existing patent laws, a new regulation, thought to be a preemptive response to the development of a vaccine for COVID-19, has expanded the scope of the government’s ability to use patents in the public interest.The changes are contained in Presidential Regulation No. 77/2020 regarding Procedures of Patent Implementation by the Government, which took effect on July 8, 2020, and is an implementing regulation of Patent Law No. 13/2016 (chapter 7, articles 109–120).