IP, Trademarks, Domains & Software Licensing

Intellectual property, the trademarks that sit on top of it, the domain names that carry it online, and the licences that let others use it are really one connected problem. This page covers all four, across the United States, the European Union, Pakistan, India, China, Russia and the Middle East.

Intellectual property & trademarks by jurisdiction

China's CNIPA is now the world's single largest trademark office by filing volume — roughly 7 million application classes in 2024 — despite a modest year-on-year dip, and enforcement against domestic squatting has improved even as foreign rights-holders still report uneven results. India is close behind in growth terms: over 537,000 trademark applications in 2024, 95% of them domestic, with a decade-long average growth rate near 10% a year. The US and EU remain the most litigation-tested regimes, with mature case law on dilution, fair use and bad-faith registration. Pakistan's IPO-Pakistan registry exists and functions, but enforcement through the civil courts is slow, and trademark squatting of foreign brands remains a live risk before local registration. Russia's Civil Code (Part IV) still formally protects IP, but since 2022 Russia has legalised "parallel imports" from unfriendly-listed countries and courts have in several cases denied compensation to rights-holders from those countries — foreign IP protection there is now unreliable in practice, not just in theory. The Gulf states are modernising quickly, with UAE and Saudi trademark offices both digitising filing and tightening enforcement against counterfeit goods, a priority given the region's role as a re-export hub.

Domain name arbitration

The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP), administered mainly through WIPO, remains the default global mechanism for taking back a domain registered in bad faith. 2025 was a record year: more than 6,200 UDRP and related proceedings were filed with WIPO alone — the highest volume in the policy's 25-year history — with a marked rise in AI-related disputes (deepfake and impersonation domains among public figures) alongside the usual brand-squatting cases. Coverage is uneven by country-code: .in (India) runs its own INDRP modelled closely on UDRP; .eu has its own ADR procedure; China's .cn is subject to a CNNIC-administered policy that largely mirrors UDRP but is applied by domestic panels; Russia's .ru sits outside UDRP entirely, decided instead through Russian courts or the .RU/.РФ Coordination Center's own rules, with predictably limited recourse for foreign complainants since 2022; and Pakistan's .pk registry has no dedicated, WIPO-style arbitration policy at all, leaving disputes to ordinary (slow) civil litigation.

Software licensing

Three licensing models dominate, and they carry different legal risk. Proprietary licensing (SaaS terms of service, EULAs) is a contract problem: jurisdiction and limitation-of-liability clauses matter most, and China and Russia both increasingly require domestic hosting or local-entity contracting for enterprise software sold to their markets. Open-source licensing is a compliance problem: copyleft licences (GPL family) can force disclosure of proprietary code built on top of them, and the last two years have seen a sharp rise in disputes over whether AI models trained on open-source or copyrighted code infringe the licences or copyrights of the underlying material — a live, unsettled question in US courts (fair use arguments) and increasingly regulated in the EU, where the AI Act imposes training-data transparency obligations on general-purpose AI model providers. SaaS/cloud licensing raises the additional question of data residency: Russia's data localisation law and China's Cybersecurity/PIPL regime can make a standard US-hosted SaaS product legally unusable for a local subsidiary without a local hosting arrangement.

Evolutions and trends

Three shifts stand out heading into 2026: first, AI is now a major driver of both trademark/domain disputes (impersonation, deepfakes) and software-licensing disputes (training-data provenance); second, China's dominance in raw filing volume is increasingly matched by improving — if still inconsistent — enforcement quality; and third, the EU's planned "Digital Omnibus" simplification for 2026 signals a rare move toward lighter compliance burdens for smaller companies, a departure from the steady tightening seen elsewhere.

Applicable laws by jurisdiction

US: Lanham Act (trademarks), Copyright Act & DMCA, Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) · EU: EU Trademark Regulation, EUIPO framework, Unified Patent Court Agreement, Digital Services Act · Pakistan: Trade Marks Ordinance 2001, Copyright Ordinance 1962, Patents Ordinance 2000 · India: Trade Marks Act 1999, Copyright Act 1957, Patents Act 1970 · China: Trademark Law (2019 amendment), Copyright Law, Anti-Unfair Competition Law · Russia: Civil Code Part IV (IP), post-2022 parallel-import decrees · Middle East: GCC Unified Trademark Law plus national IP statutes (UAE Federal Law, Saudi Law of Trademarks)

Talk to us before you file, license, or launch

Whether you're registering a trademark across several of these jurisdictions at once, licensing software into China or Russia, or fighting a bad-faith domain registration, the right first move depends entirely on which of these seven regimes you're in.

References

WIPO — 2025 record year for domain disputes · WIPO — World IP Indicators 2025 · Clarivate — Trademark Filing Trends 2026

This page is general information, not legal advice, and not a substitute for advice on your specific situation. IP, trademark and licensing law changes frequently and varies by jurisdiction — always confirm the current position with the relevant IP office and contact us before acting. ← Back to IT, IP & Compliance overview