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The man in charge of assessing whether the UK needs a Digital Copyright Exchange has set out what he thinks is wrong with the country’s digital copyright regime

Yahoo! has filed a complaint in the Northern District of California against Facebook, possibly ushering in a new era of patent wars among internet companies. There are 10 patents being asserted, covering advertising, privacy, customisation, social networking and messaging technology. "For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo! got there first and was therefore granted patents by the United States Patent Office to protect those innovations," said Yahoo! in the complaint. The lawsuit followed reports that Yahoo! in February demanded licensing fees from Facebook, which Facebook apparently refused. Charles Verhoeven of Quinn Emanuel is representing Yahoo!, while Cooley's Stephen Neal and WilmerHale's William Lee will be representing Facebook. In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson called the complaint "puzzling" and said: "We're disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation."

Although there have been online protests against Bill C-11, they haven’t been on the scale of those in the US against SOPA and PIPA, or in Europe against ACTA Canada's copyright reform bill took a big step to becoming law last month, when the committee on Bill C-11 wrapped up its clause-by-clause review leaving some of the major points of contention – fair dealing exceptions for education, digital locks and ISP liability – unchanged.

Emma Barraclough, London and Kanishk Verghese, Hong Kong

“There’s still a lot of headshaking about this [gTLD allocation] method”

A surprise judgment in Mayo v Prometheus has overturned the US Federal Circuit. Its impact on life sciences patents should not be exaggerated, argue Eileen McDermott and Karen Bolipata

Douglas Masters of Loeb & Loeb, counsel to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and Ramon Ramirez explain how the organisers of the March Madness basketball tournament safeguard its IP rights

The US Supreme Court today granted cert in Association for Molecular Pathology v Myriad Genetics, vacating the judgment and remanding the case to the Federal Circuit

Common sense and clear guidelines can enable brand owners to use social media like any other form of communication, according to panellists at Asialaw’s In-House Counsel Summit last week

The number of patents granted in the UK last year rose by more than a third, the largest leap in a decade