On April 8 and 9, 2010 (local time), the 18th Annual Conference on Intellectual Property Law & Policy was held at Fordham University School of Law in New York City, USA. Judge Tamotsu Shouji, representing the Intellectual Property (IP) High Court, participated.

This international conference on intellectual property (IP), which was hosted by Fordham University School of Law, attracted about 400 participants from 30 countries including judges, government officials from the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and other organizations, lawyers, and university professors, all of whom are IP specialists. A total of about 140 speakers and panelists gave presentations and took part in panel discussions. On April 7 prior to this Annual Conference, Judge Shouji attended the "6th Annual Asian IP Law and Policy Day, Recent IP Law and Developments in Asia," also held at Fordham University School of Law.

The Annual Conference was comprised of a Plenary Session in which all participants took part, and a number of Concurrent Sessions on various topics held simultaneously. At the Plenary Session, keynote speeches on "IP Policy and the Obama Administration" and "IP Issues and Policy in the European Union" were followed by speeches and panel discussions by representatives from WIPO, WTO, European Commission, and USTR under the title of "Multilateral and Bilateral Trade Issues: WIPO, WTO, European Commission, USTR." Presentations and panel discussions were also held at the Concurrent Sessions, which were comprised of the Patent Session, the Copyright Session, and the Trademark Session.

Judge Shouji participated as a speaker in the "Developments in Japanese Patent Law" section of the patent session. Under the title "The "Dual-Track" System in Japan: Will conflict result from Invalidity Decision being made in both the JPO and the Courts?" Judge Shouji gave a presentation and took part in a panel discussion on the dual-track issue* that has become a major issue in Japan, touching on how the issue emerged, giving an outline of the problems and conceivable measures to solve the problems, and explaining how the IP High Court is dealing with the matter.

*The dual-track issue stems from the fact that there exists a dual-track system to challenge the validity of patents: patent invalidation trials in the JPO and patent infringement litigation in district courts.

The summary of the speech is available here(429KB).