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.
