Asia-Pacific Moot Court Competition 2026

International trademark law evolved from a patchwork of national regimes into a layered global system anchored by the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883), which established core principles of national treatment and the right of priority. The Madrid System, comprising the Madrid Agreement (1891) and the Madrid Protocol (1989) and administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), later created a centralized mechanism allowing right-holders to seek protection in multiple jurisdictions through a single application. With the entry into force of the WTO TRIPS Agreement in 1995, minimum substantive standards for trademark protection, including the recognition of well-known marks under Article 6bis of Paris and Article 16 of TRIPS, became binding on nearly all trading states. Despite this convergence, significant doctrinal fault lines persist. Jurisdictions diverge on first-to-file versus first-to-use priority, on the scope of protection for non-traditional marks (shapes, colors, sounds, smells), on the treatment of bad-faith filings and trademark squatting, and on the territorial reach of injunctions in cross-border online infringement. The rise of e-commerce platforms, keyword advertising, and the global secondary market have intensified disputes over parallel imports and the doctrine of international versus national exhaustion, while geographical indications remain a sustained source of friction between the European Union's sui generis approach and the certification-mark model favored in much of the common-law world. In the Asia-Pacific region, the issue is acute. China's shift toward stronger enforcement and punitive damages, recurring concerns about bad-faith registrations, and the proliferation of free trade agreements containing TRIPS-plus provisions (notably the CPTPP and RCEP) are reshaping the regional landscape. Recent disputes over well-known marks, NFT and metaverse goods classifications, and platform liability are pushing courts to articulate new rules at the intersection of traditional trademark doctrine and the digital economy.

Unfair competition law originated in late nineteenth-century Europe as a response to commercial practices that, while not infringing any registered right, distorted honest market conduct. Article 10bis of the Paris Convention, introduced in 1900 and strengthened in subsequent revisions, obliges member states to provide effective protection against acts of competition contrary to honest practices in industrial or commercial matters, expressly prohibiting confusion, false allegations discrediting a competitor, and misleading indications. TRIPS Article 39 later extended this framework to the protection of undisclosed information (trade secrets) and regulatory data, embedding unfair competition principles within the WTO system. The field is notoriously heterogeneous. Civil-law jurisdictions such as Germany, Japan, and China have enacted dedicated unfair competition statutes addressing passing off, comparative advertising, commercial bribery, trade secret misappropriation, and online conduct such as traffic hijacking and malicious interference with platform operations. Common-law jurisdictions typically rely on the tort of passing off, breach of confidence, and consumer protection statutes, producing functionally similar but doctrinally distinct outcomes. Convergence has been uneven, and the digital economy has generated novel categories of dispute — data scraping, algorithmic manipulation, fake reviews, influencer marketing, and the misappropriation of platform-generated data — that strain traditional categories. In the Asia-Pacific, China's 2017 and 2019 amendments to its Anti-Unfair Competition Law, Japan's repeated revisions of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act to strengthen trade secret protection, and Korea's expansion of its Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secret Protection Act to cover idea misappropriation and reputation free-riding signal an active regional reform agenda. Cross-border trade secret theft, comparative advertising disputes, and platform-versus-platform litigation are increasingly arbitrated or litigated in regional fora, raising difficult questions about choice of law, the territorial scope of injunctions, and the interface between competition policy and intellectual property.