Afghanistan: Intellectual Property

The Court of Justice of the European Union has delivered its first definitive interpretation of the "pastiche" exception in EU copyright law, establishing that sampling and other creative borrowing can qualify as fair use when they engage in recognizable artistic dialogue with source material. This landmark ruling in the decades-long Kraftwerk sampling dispute charts a middle course between overly narrow and catch-all approaches, requiring that borrowed elements be used openly and recognizably rather than c

The European Patent Office's recent referral of case T 873/24 to the Enlarged Board of Appeal may extend last summer's landmark G 1/24 decision on claim interpretation to the analysis of Added Subject-Matter.

The European Patent Office has released its 2026 Guidelines for Examination, incorporating two landmark rulings that fundamentally change how patent claims are interpreted and what constitutes prior art. These updates introduce mandatory use of patent descriptions in claim interpretation, eliminate the reproducibility requirement for marketed products as prior art, and establish the EPO's first formal guidance on artificial intelligence in patent proceedings.