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Stéphanie Bodoni, London

Emma Barraclough, Hong Kong

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.

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).

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.

EU: The international trade committee of the European Parliament met with international trade bodies on January 18, as part of its consideration of an October European Commission draft regulation on compulsory licences for medicines intended for export to developing countries. The meeting focused on how the introduction of new IP rights in developing countries, in line with the TRIPs Agreement, would affect public health. UK: Rules to modernize the patent system were introduced in January. The Patents Act 2004, many parts of which came into effect on January 1, includes new provisions on costs and expenses in infringement proceedings, restrictions on filing abroad and remedies in entitlement proceedings. It also aims to bring more clarity to the vague area of compensation for employee-inventors. UK: The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry released its Digital Music Report 2005, concluding that digital music sites are taking off among consumers thanks to more legal online sites and portable listening devices such as Apple's iPod. The number of legal downloading sites increased to 230 in 2004, with consumers buying 200 million songs in 2004 compared with 20 million songs in 2003.

Under the Mexican Industrial Property Law (IPL), in force since August 2 1994, a trade mark application resulting either in a relative or an absolute ground for refusal can be objected to in a first instance proceeding before the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI). This proceeding provides the applicant with a reasonable term to file arguments to overcome the objection. If the arguments submitted by the applicant do not overcome the objection, according to IMPI's criteria, the application should be formally refused.

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

On December 21 China's Supreme People's Court and the Procuratorate jointly issued an Interpretation on Various Issues Relating to the Handling of Criminal Actions on IPR Infringements (the Interpretation). This came into effect a day later on December 22.