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US membership of the Madrid Protocol may be only a few months away according to Bruce MacPherson, director of external affairs of the International Trademark Association. Thanks to pressure from US companies and the INTA, the legislation to implement membership, first considered in 1989, is nearing the end of its journey through Congress. Attempts to implement the Protocol have not been easy. It has been dogged by conflict with the EU, and lately by complications over Cuba's role.

Time, patience and sympathy ran out for the Ukraine on March 13 when, nine months after the central Asian country committed itself to implementing anti-counterfeiting measures, the US Trade Representative (USTR) designated it a Priority Foreign Country (PFC).

Australian copyright law has been overhauled with amendments covering moral rights and digital protection. Kristin Stammer provides a guide for copyright owners and users of copyright material

Research into the human genome has opened up the possibility of collecting, publishing and even patenting individual genes. Andreas Schrell and Nils Heide explain how a new law will regulate the gene database in Estonia

Kathleen E McCarthy, Morgan & Finnegan, LLP

A ruling that has received wide public attention in the United States, even in the popular press, is the one that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) handed down on February 14 2001 in Amazon.com Inc v Barnesandnoble.com Inc. This ruling vacated a district court's preliminary injunction order preventing Barnes and Noble (BN) from continuing to offer its own so-called "one-click" method for ordering books and other goods online during the course of Amazon's suit asserting that the BN method infringes an Amazon method patent. Despite all the publicity accorded to the ruling, it rests upon very well-established law, widely availed of to defeat preliminary injunction motions in patent infringement suits throughout at least the twentieth century. Its claim to the degree of publicity it received rests upon the case's status as one of the earliest efforts to enforce a "business method" patent against an alleged infringer and not upon the novelty of the legal ruling.

Due to growing importance of modern achievements of biotechnology in industry, agriculture and medicine, an adequate legal protection of IP rights in this field is one of the most vital issues world-wide (including in Russia) that needs to be solved for the benefit of public.

BRAZIL: From March 6, the Brazilian agency responsible for the registration of domain names (FAPESP) will allow registration by foreign companies. Before that date, registration could only be made by local companies.

A recent EPO decision has challenged the conventional exclusion on double patenting. Neil Thomson asks where the decision leaves EPO practice, and what impact it will have on proceedings in the UK

Nils V Montan, incoming president of the INTA, is a pragmatist, and believes that beating pirates requires a carrot as well as a stick. Tabitha Parker asked him about the challenges facing trade mark and copyright owners in the new millennium