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On January 12 2017, the Ho Chi Minh City Court rendered a ruling in favour of a major Silicon Valley high-tech company. This ended a lengthy dispute between the company and a Vietnamese entity over the latter's unauthorised use and registration of a company name and a domain name which incorporated the former's registered trade mark. To the delight of the US company, the court resolved the dispute in an expedient 55 days. The brand owner's course of action provided a useful test of new regulations on domain name and company name disputes.

Trade mark registrations sometimes take turns which would not be expected in the normal run of things. The trade mark owner usually registers his trade mark to sell his goods, promote his services, etc. Sometimes the infrastructure is not ready and the trade mark is not used for some time. In order that the trade mark owner should not be too relaxed there is a pike in the lake to keep all trade mark owners awake. The pike in this context is the law which allows three years of carefree existence of a trade mark.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case of Lee Jason Kibler, d/b/a DJ Logic v Robert Bryson Hall, II, et al, issued a ruling which set forth several instructional tips on the value of marketing through social media channels in seeking to demonstrate the strength of a trade mark.

The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) announced last month that the fees for patent search and examination reports and for trade mark applications will be reduced effective April 1 2017.

Both parties in this case produce and commercialise ticket and entry systems for skiing areas, stadiums and similar establishments and have the same customer circles. The plaintiff additionally runs server installations for internet use by its customers, who use its systems to store clients' data. This data is protected by a login requiring a username and password. The data can be read in the form of reports, for example concerning names and addresses of buyers of tickets. The same is possible on a server of a larger customer on which the plaintiff runs that application for the customer. These reports were routinely stored on caches as intermediate storage media.

In a first for Australia, our courts have ordered ISPs to block the websites of a number of torrenting sites. In Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Ltd [2016] FCA 1503, Justice Nicholas ordered a collection of ISPs to block the websites of a number of well-known bittorrenting sites. The sites included in the blocking order are The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and SolarMovie.

Highlights at the International Trade Commission in 2016 included the most Section 337 investigations since 2011, the first live hearing for a decade and the first antitrust claim for 25 years. Michael Loney asks ITC practitioners what trends they expect in 2017

The tension in the relationship between patent rights and plant breeder's rights (PBR) is widely known. Recently, some EU member states have opposed the decision taken by the Enlarged Board of Appeals of the European Patent Office (EPO) in cases G2/12 and G2/13 .

A Dutch court issued decisions in two court actions that illustrate the remedies that are available from the Dutch courts in cases of contributory infringement. The court found that it had jurisdiction to issue a preliminary injunction on offering and supplying a contributorily infringing product inside and outside the Netherlands, also against a non-Dutch party. The patent acts throughout Europe were essentially identical on contributory infringement. However, the court held that patent law excluded an injunction on holding a contributorily infringing product in stock.

As explained in previous briefings, the new Civil and Commercial Code includes a series of rules referring, either directly or indirectly, to intellectual and industrial property matters which we have already reviewed in detail.