The technological revolution, the decline of manufacturing, inconsistent case law and an increasing recognition of the value of intellectual property (IP) rights is keeping UK specialist lawyers on their toes of late -- and a raft of changes are on the way.A measure of the success enjoyed by this specialism is the arrival in London of premier US IP specialist Howrey Simon Arnold & White.

Its launch last week was attended by the firm's Washington-based consultant Todd Dickinson -- the former under-secretary for commerce in the Clinton administration, and director of the US patent and trade mark office.Michael Skrein, IP partner at City firm Richards Butler, says: 'It's certainly been quite an active year.

IP rights seem to be something people increasingly recognise as having value.

It must be something to do with the British economy, which isn't about making things any more.'Lawyers agree that despite last year's dot-com crash, the Internet is generating a lot of work, with domain name disputes a particularly active area.

Gordon Harris, IP partner at Birmingham firm Wragge & Co, says: 'The crash affected the e-commerce side -- but everyone has a Web site now, and a lot of issues arise out of that.'On the domain name front, cybersquatters -- people who register the Web site address of a company then try to charge the firm to hand it over -- protest sites (the notorious suck.com sites -- which seek to undermine the official sites) and the addition of new domain name suffixes such as .net and .eu, are all generating work.Jason Rawkins, IP partner at City firm Taylor Joynson Garrett, says the recent 'One In A Million' case, where large companies worked together to reclaim their domain names from cybersquatters, provides a good precedent against UK culprits.But as Hamish Porter, Theodore Goddard's head of IP, maintains that, since the Woolf reforms, many companies are abandoning litigation in favour of alternative dispute resolution.Domain name disputes invariably go to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) using the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) procedure rather than the law courts, he says.'The procedure is effective and relatively cheap but the downside is, you don't get your costs.

It's important for clients to protect their trademarks and get these domain names back but because defendants know that claimants won't get their costs, they often ask for say £2,000 for "expenses" in return for the domain name.

Clients make a commercial decision -- they know that if they go to WIPO it will probably cost more than that so they pay up.'The commercial incentive to hold trademark holders to ransom could be remedied by awarding costs to one party or another.'Getting a domain name returned is not a foregone conclusion.

Mr Harris, who sits on the WIPO board which implements the ICANN procedure, recently refused to return brucespringstein.com to the singer since the owner was a genuine fan who was not seeking to make money out of the name.Wragge & Co has been involved in drafting new rules for UK Internet registry Nominet, to bring its procedure for settling domain name disputes involving .co.uk Uniform Resource Locators -- a standard way developed to specify the location of a resource available electronically -- more closely in line with the ICANN procedure when introduced in the autumn.Mr Skrein, who recently helped Direct Line shut down a suck.com protest site, says: 'The Nominet procedure is not at all adequate.

If a disputed domain name is a .co.uk, you would have to sue.

The changes being proposed are a good deal better.'Mr Harris comments: 'The ICANN procedure is very good.

It's just a pity that people are treating previous decisions as authority.

There is no need for a system of precedent with WIPO.

You have a set of rules to apply in each case.

By turning it into a quasi-common law system, you are just elongating and complicating the procedure.

It detracts from the benefit of the system as a whole, ie that it is fast and cheap.'A recent trademark case which has, as Mr Skrein describes it, 'put the cat among the pigeons', is Arsenal's bid to prevent a street trader from selling unlicensed merchandise outside Highbury.

The club claimed trademark infringement (see Intellectual property law update, page 40).Mr Justice Laddie has asked the European Court of Justice whether the defence that the trader was not using the name and logo in the true sense as a trademark, to indicate trade origin, but rather as a badge of allegiance, is valid.As Mr Skrein says: 'The defence argued that people buy such merchandise to demonstrate affection and support for the club and not to fill the coffers of the club.'The case law is not entirely consistent.

People have been able to argue both ways.

It makes it more difficult to predict the outcome.'Mr Rawkins says: 'The way courts are going right now, especially in the UK, seems to be inclined against celebrities and famous organisations being able to monopolise their images.'One IP partner, who asked not to be named, maintains: 'The Arsenal case was a terrible decision.

It's the latest in a long line of disastrously awful decisions which butcher the Trademark Act' (passed in 1938 and amended in 1984).'Judges are getting carried away and looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

They are taking it upon themselves to do down intellectual property rights.'Despite obvious activity in the trademark field, Mr Harris says that 'on the whole things are a little quiet at the moment', with the general election hitting work on the non-contentious side.

'Elections create a hiatus in activity.

Even if the result is a foregone conclusion, there is still a natur al pause which hits both corporate work and IP support.'On the litigation side, since last year UK courts have been willing to grant stays of UK patent litigation pending the outcome of European oppositions [to a patent grant].

It can take years for an opposition to go through the European Patent Office -- the record is 14 years -- and this acts as a deterrent to starting litigation.'It will pick up if the European Patent Office gets organised and gets cases through in under a year, but at the moment it doesn't.'Matters may improve if a proposed EU-wide patent is implemented which, Mr Rawkins explains, would save time and money since companies would not have to obtain and maintain patents in each member state.He says if implemented, the patent is likely to be supported by a regulatory system which could involve a centralised court of first instance and court of appeal, and/or a court of first instance at domestic level, the decisions of which would have community-wide effect.Other changes on the way include a European copyright directive -- which aims to bring copyright law up to date, particularly with regard to the Internet -- and a European design directive, which will harmonise industry design protection.Mr Harris says: 'Many countries have had no design protection until now, while in this country, they probably go further than in the directive so we may get reined in a bit.'He adds that the new database directive and the William Hill case -- in which the court ruled that the bookmaker was breaking the law by using lists of runners for races from the British Horseracing Board's database -- 'has got lots of people reviewing their positions because it creates a new intellectual property right'.Also set to have an impact domestically are the IP protocols, which will set out procedures to follow pre-trial.Mr Skrein, who is chairman of the committee -- originally convened by the Law Society, which reports to the Lord Chancellor's Department -- charged with drafting the protocols, explains that since IP law is so diverse, different protocols are being drawn up for different areas, including breach of confidence, copyright and design, passing off, registered trade marks, and patents.The protocols are about to go out for consultation with implementation expected before the end of the year.Mr Harris says the business-method patents -- for example, that established by Amazon for its one-click technology for ordering over the Internet -- will increasingly be used in Europe since 'it is always keen to keep up with the US'.The impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 will also be 'significant', he says.

'If you have a difficult case and you're in trouble you can look at the Human Rights Act and see what can be done about it.'For example, he says, the freedom of expression provisions could possibly be used in parallel trade cases to prevent brand users banning the sale of grey imports -- products made for one market and imported either as new or used into another market -- by other retailers.Mr Porter says the Act has also arguably created a new privacy right under the guise of confidentiality, as illustrated in the Michael Douglas/Catherine Zeta Jones case against Hello! magazine over the confidentiality of their wedding photos.But Paddy Ashdown's bid to claim infringement of copyright over leaked letters, establishes that copyright is not affected by the Act, he adds.Despite this, IP law is clearly on the move, and lawyers who want to keep ahead of the game will need to keep in tune with this fast-changing landsca pe.LINKS: www.richardsbutler.com