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Stéphanie Bodoni, London

US: For the 12th consecutive year, IBM was granted more US patents than any other company in 2004. The company received 3,248 patents. Second-placed Matsushita received 1,934 patents (see chart). US: ICANN has received five applications to run the .net top-level domain, which is due to be transferred later this year. Afilias, CORE++ Asociación, DENIC, Sentan and VeriSign all submitted their applications by the January 18 deadline. US: The USPTO granted 187,170 patents, including 169,296 utility, 16,533 design and 998 plant patents, in 2004. The Office also registered 155,991 trade marks and renewed 34,735 marks. US: In a joint court briefing filed with the Supreme Court in the Grokster case, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America called on the Court to overturn a lower court's ruling that peer-to-peer file-sharing networks are not guilty of contributory liability. The associations argued that the networks are guilty of "encouraging and assisting the massive illegal downloading and uploading by the users of their services" of copyrighted content. US: The selling of protected keywords by internet search engines does not infringe trade mark owners' rights, according to a ruling in the case of Google v Geico. The decision by a judge in the Eastern District of Virginia means that Google can continue to sell trade marked words to its sponsors, whose advertisements appear whenever the mark is entered as a search query. US: A licensing deal between EMI Music Publishing, the world's largest music publisher, and record company Sony BMG Music Entertainment will see the companies' songs made available for mobile products, such as telephone ring tones, and will also cover the display of music videos on video-on-demand and similar services. The agreement also provides for a new product called DualDisc, a CD player on one side and a DVD player on the other.

Singapore is due to accede to the Geneva Act (1999) of the Hague Agreement during the first half of 2005, in line with the Registered Designs (Amendment) Act 2004 which came into force on January 1 2005. This will allow Singapore to meet its obligations under the European Free Trade Association-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (ESFTA).

Emma Barraclough, Hong Kong

Dr Shirish Sherlekar and Dr Ankasha Tejam, AstraZeneca

Suppliers to the public sector should note that confidentiality clauses in agreements with public authorities which allow disclosure of confidential information as required by law will permit disclosure by authorities under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

According to Section 10(1) of the German Patent Act, a patent has the effect that any third party that does not have the consent of the patentee is prevented from offering or supplying a component relating to an essential element of the invention. According to the recent Flügelrad decision of the German Supreme Court (X ZR 48/03 dated May 4 2004), in assessing what is an essential element of the invention, only components that have a functional interaction with other elements of the patented device can infringe the patent.

You litigate inside the courtroom; you settle cases outside the courtroom. That's conventional wisdom. But, as the number of cases filed each year continues to increase, more and more courts are getting involved in helping the parties settle their dispute. This is a trend that is expected to continue and it is a development that should be embraced by litigants.

A recently reported Malaysian High Court decision has demonstrated that the country's courts will make a determination based on the judge's visual impression rather than deferring to the opinion of witnesses on the issue of novelty in designs.

Neil Hobbs, IP lawyer at Virgin Enterprises Limited, explains how the company protects more than 2,500 domain names and reveals why it has decided to consolidate its registrations