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Geoffrey Lin has left Hogan Lovells to join the Shanghai office of Ropes & Gray as a partner. Lin will be working with corporate lawyers at the firm, which set up its Shanghai office in July, to value the IP assets within deals and to structure the transactions.

More than 10,000 brand owners are expected to block their trade mark from being used in a .xxx adult domain. Businesses from outside the adult entertainment industry can use the trade mark blocking system during the sunrise period for .xxx, which was opened on September 7 2011 by ICM Registry. The sunrise period closes on October 28. Trade mark holders make a one-off payment to registrars which blocks a domain for 10 years. The opt-out system, which was a condition of in March 2011, allows businesses to block a domain that matches their mark exactly. Registrars have seen a positive response from their clients. Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer at MarkMonitor, said the interest in the blocking system was the highest since the launch of the European .eu domain in December 2005. "I expect that this will probably result in approximately 50% of the volume we saw in .eu registrations," he said. Chief executive Lawley said he was happy that the .xxx domain had finally been initiated. "It's been a long road and we are very excited, and it's great to see it come to fruition now."

A district court ruling has upheld the business model of online music lockers, but left some questions unresolved. The Southern District of New York partially granted the parties' motions for summary judgment in Capitol Records v MP3tunes. The suit was filed in 2007 by EMI and 14 record companies and music publishers, alleging that online music locker MP3tunes infringed their copyrights. In the opinion, Judge William Pauley ruled that online music lockers are eligible under the safe harbours of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) if they adhere to copyright holders' takedown notices concerning specific infringement. While that ruling is good news for MP3tunes and services like it, Pauley also found MP3tunes liable for contributory infringement. MP3tunes operates a second website, www.sideload.com, a search engine that links to third party sites containing free song files. By removing only the Sideload.com links to EMI's works but not the actual content from users' lockers, MP3tunes was found to have contributorily infringed the copyrighted works. MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson was also found to have directly infringed works by downloading songs to his personal storage locker that were identified by EMI as unauthorised.

The European trade mark office is getting ready to provide a mediation service for trade mark owners and applicants, which could begin at the end of the month. The Office says it will provide mediation without charge for parties who attend its Alicante headquarters. It plans to offer mediation for appeals cases, but might expand its service to cover cancellation and opposition cases.

Samsung was barred from distributing three models of its Galaxy smartphone after rival Apple won a preliminary injunction in The Netherlands. In a decision from late August, Judge Brinkman of the Hague District Court granted the injunction after provisionally finding that Samsung infringed Apple's European patent for a portable electronic device for photo management. The decision is effective from the middle of this month. It applies to Samsung's Galaxy S, S II and Ace smartphones on penalty of a payment of €100,000 a day or €10 for each infringing product. The judge found that other rights asserted by Apple, including patents and designs, were not infringed. He also declined to issue an injunction against Samsung's Galaxy tablet computer. The extent to which the injunction will prevent Samsung distributing its products in other European countries is unclear at this stage. The patent at issue is valid in a number of other European countries. Samsung may also be able to reengineer its phones and design around the Apple patent. The decision proved that cross-border injunctions in preliminary proceedings are alive and well in the Netherlands.

China, Sweden and New Zealand have all amended their trade mark laws or made proposals to do so in the past few months. The news was good for patent owners in the latter two countries, but less so in China. The latest draft of amendments to its Trade Mark Act disappointed brand owners, who had hoped that officials would use the law to get tougher on bad faith registrations.

Musicians and record companies are celebrating after EU member states voted to extend the length of time during which performers and producers can claim royalties.

The USPTO had begun hiring, accusations of malpractice were being made and WIPO had welcomed a new era of harmonisation, even before Barack Obama got to the podium. Eileen McDermott, Patrick Ross and Karen Bolipata report from Washington, New York and Los Angeles

I clearly remember watching Stanley Kubricks' 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was a teenager. It was abstract, both in method and presentation. It made little more sense than French films like Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, but it presented such a grand vision, in such grand style, that you just stared credulously at the apes and that big, black tablet.

An affirmative vote by Ashurst and Blake Dawson on September 23 has paved the way for a merger between the two firms.