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Margot Fröhlinger, a former senior official in the European Commission's IP team, has taken on a new role. She has joined the EPO as principal director for patent law and international affairs in DG 5. Fröhlinger is widely credited with driving discussions on an EU unitary patent and unified litigation system, although member states have yet to agree a final deal.

Applicants for new gTLDs were left vexed last month after ICANN suspended the process due to a technical fault. It later emerged that some applicants had been able to see others' file names and user names.

The man in charge of assessing whether the UK needs a Digital Copyright Exchange set out last month what he thinks is wrong with the country's digital copyright regime. Richard Hooper published his diagnostic report on whether copyright licensing is fit for purpose in the digital age. This month he will start work on the second part of the project, finding what he calls "industry-led" solutions to the problems he has identified.

An Australian appeal court last month ruled that Google's AdWords programme misleads and deceives consumers and ordered the company to change its system. The full Federal Court gave its decision on April 3 in a case brought against the search engine by the country's consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

AOL's $1.06 billion patent deal with Microsoft comes as no surprise following recent similar blockbuster deals, but the announcement has led to speculation about Microsoft's plans for the patents, as well as who will be next. The deal, announced last month, will hand over more than 800 AOL patents to Microsoft and licences to an additional 300. The 800 patents have not been disclosed, though the remaining 300 relate to advertising, search, content generation, social networking, mapping and multimedia/streaming technologies, according to AOL. "Sounds very Google-like, doesn't it?" commented Art Monk, vice president of UBM TechInsights. David Pratt, president of asset management firm M-CAM predicted Amazon could be a likely candidate for the next big patent deal. So far, the e-commerce company has seven social networking patents. "If the Facebook IPO is successful, they will look at how to pay investors back, and may look at the monetisation of the user base – [rather than] just getting ad revenue from Facebook," Pratt said. "If they do, and you're an entity that was already a phenomenal e-commerce site and it turned out you were holding e-commerce social networking patents, that might be a really interesting situation to be in."

Attendees at the Fordham IP Conference last month heard positive sounds from WIPO and saw trade mark examiners grilled. But Judge Denny Chin (right) wanted the audience to know two things: first, he is not an IP expert; second, he is not a China expert.

A ruling by the New York Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has cast doubt on the way US internet companies rely on notice-and-takedown procedures.

Siemens succeeded in having the domain name siemensit.org transferred to it in a recent WIPO case, but failed with siemitglobal.com

Nominet, which manages all the .uk domains, has asked for submissions from the industry on how its registrar agreement could be improved.

Couvreurs Mont Blanc failed to have an identical domain transferred to it in a recent UDRP case because it had insufficient rights to the mark