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A series of innovative yet controversial television commercials in New Zealand promoting Roche's weight management product XENICAL have won the 2000 prestigious Television New Zealand/Marketing Magazine Supreme Award.

New decisions and rulings on domain names are coming thick and fast from Palestine to Belgium. The past month has seen some significant amendments and cases. MIP rounds up some of the latest domain name developments. US: www.vw.net Volkswagen won the right to the domain name vw.net. Virtual Works of Virginia registered VW.NET in October 1996, but Volkswagen claimed the use constituted infringement and dilution of its mark. Virtual Works filed a civil lawsuit to block an attempt to reassign its domain name claiming that .net was for networking operations, not automobiles. In February 2000 a court ruled that the car maker was entitled to the name as Virtual Works had attempted to sell the domain name to Volkswagen which was a violation of the 1999 Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. A three-judge panel upheld this decision on January 22 2000.

Nearly one-third of European dot-com companies are failing to protect their trade marks in their home markets, according to a new survey. Even worse, just 60% have registered any trade marks overseas and four out of five have spent nothing on patent protection. The findings come in a survey of 400 senior managers at companies in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. The survey was carried out by Landwell, the correspondent law firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In a court room in San Francisco, Judge Stuart Pollack ruled that online auctioneer eBay cannot be sued for auctioning sound recordings over its web site even if they infringe copyright.

Decision 486 of the Andean Community, which came into force on December 1 2000 in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, introduced fundamental changes to the licensing regime in the Andean Community.

With registrations buoyant and litigation increasingly attractive, UK trade mark practitioners are busier than ever. Jeremy Phillips looks back on a vintage year

Lucian Enescu and Cristian Nástase of Rominvent in Bucharest reveal how to deal with counterfeiting in Romania

Peter Verhaag, of Arnold & Siedsma in The Hague, discusses the criteria for judging the distinctiveness of community trade marks

Michael Lantos, of Danubia Patent & Trademark Attorneys in Budapest, reviews the status of trade mark protection in Hungary and makes some predictions for the future

Michel Jolicoeur and Nicola Tarantini, of Racheli & C SpA, in Milan, explain how to put together effective trade mark licences