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Denise McFarland a specialist trade mark and intellectual property barrister at Three New Square, recently appeared in court for Yell, the owner of leading UK directory the Yellow Pages, in a case which gave a stark warning that the internet is not a nebulous international space.

Yell was suing a man called Louis Giboin, McFarland writes. He was the 'architect' of two websites which provided online directories for transport businesses and road haulage users. The websites used the sign 'Transport Yellow Pages' and a 'walking fingers' logo identical to Yellow Pages' well known brand. Yell objected to the websites using its trade marks.

In court Giboin argued that 'Yellow Pages' and the walking fingers logo were 'generic' over the internet, and were used all over the world in relation to directories which had nothing to do with Yell. He also said that because the websites weren't UK-based and operated abroad (he lived in Qatar) they weren't anything do with the English courts. He claimed that trying to stop his websites from operating was to somehow overextend the power of the English court and Yell's limited territorial rights.

But the English judge looking at the case said Yell's trade marks were well known brands in the UK, and that it was irrelevant that users of the internet in another country might not think they were distinctive. The judge came down in favour of Yell.

Giboin wasn't able to hide from the English courts behind the veil of operating outside the UK. Other international web entrepreneurs need to be aware of the laws of the countries in which their websites can be accessed, to avoid getting into similar hot water.

Denise McFarland is a specialist trade mark and intellectual property barrister at Three New Square.

Apple took its time with iCloud, didn't it, says Ovum analyst Mark Little. Good, he says, it's all the better for it. But don't cock things up by using MobileMe. It its current state, it's a donkey.

It's not easy to make it in the music business. You can't just go out and start broadcasting on the Internet and expect to get an audience.

That's a myth! Just ask Lily Allen. Or that girl who did that song about wanting to be a punk rocker.

You need a solid foundation behind you, you need assemblers to create your back story, and once that initial image has been built and tested, you need dissemblers and remote PR and marketing agents to act in local markets, pushing the brand and selling the myth.

You don't just launch a product and expect the brand to last. A lot of thought and money has to go into it.

It's much the same with media players; Apple has taken its time with iCloud, its cloud-based media streaming thing.

But it looks like it's all been worth it, says Ovum principal analyst Mark Little.

In the face of rival launches from both Amazon and Google, Apple has held its nerve and taking its time, Little writes.

It has stood Apple in good stead, allowing licensing deals to be inked and enabling existing iTunes collections to be streamed from the cloud to any Apple device without the need for laborious uploading.

Compared with Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google's (rather lazy) Beta for Music, which force users to upload their music collections all over again, iCloud looks good.

In fact, it could be the more user friendly offering; its focus on consumer experience will support Apple's continued dominance of the digital music market.

The only fly in the ointment could be the business model...

If iCloud is bundled with an unchanged MobileMe, Apple's aged and lame cloud services offering, Apple could land itself with a handicap. But if the storage and applications in MobileMe were upgraded with other useful services, it could be different.

"At the right price, Apple could at last be creating a cloud platform as a base from which to defend iTunes' dominant position, not just against Amazon and Google but perhaps more importantly, against Spotify," said Little.

A new report from Sourcewire says that technology PRs are failing to use social media to reach journalists.

Well, thank goodness for that, we say.

That's a bit like a report complaining that 'stalkers still not using your work number'. Why do we need to give cold callers new ways to invade our privacy?

Not so, says Daryl Willcox (pictured), chairman of DW Publishing, which owns Sourcewire.

"Many social channels are less invasive than that associated with cold calling, so inappropriate approaches can be comfortably ignored," says Willcox.

"Anyway, since social media is normally public, any pestering by PR professionals would be seen by many, so they'd think twice before potentially damaging their reputation online."

Social media actually polices the time wasters, he argues.

But like all powerful technology, if social media falls into the wrong hands, it's going to damage society, surely? 

"I think the 'wrong hands' are more likely to be wayward governments, criminals and terrorists. Not the PR community," says Willcox.

"PRs generally understand the conversation nature of social media and the need to develop positive relationships with journalists online, that's surely a power for good."

Hmm. Not convinced yet.

Here's the report in full:

Journalists in the U.K. are using social media, but PR pros are failing to reach them in those spaces, according to a recent survey.

Daryl Willcox Publishing contacted 957 journalists this month for its white paper titled, "Journalists and Social Media," and it found that 75 percent of journalists rate social media as an important professional tool, and 90 percent of them are using it more than they did a year ago.

However, 44 percent of journalists said they believed that PR pros did not make enough use of social media.

Of the methods of interaction, emailed news releases and pitches (98 percent and 73 percent, respectively) were the highest, followed by phone contact (56 percent) and traditional face-to-face events (51 percent). These significantly exceeded contact by social media (the highest being via Twitter, at around 25 percent).

"Journalists have been quick to incorporate social media into their processes for gathering and distributing news," said Martin Stabe, author of the report. "But journalists see social media sites primarily as a channel where they can communicate directly with potential sources or engaged members of their audience, without much involvement from PR professionals.

"However, as the report shows, this is only part of the story. Social media also empowers PR professionals to change the way they communicate with journalists or directly to customers."

Well IPv4 users are no different from those wildebeest. Like their four legged herbivorous counter parts, they know their address won't be viable for much longer. Comfortable though it is, for now, they must give up their home and embark on a long and ominous migration.

For the wildebeest, this means dragging themselves on an arduous and dangerous hike across the arid plains of the Serengetti, where they face all kinds of unpleasant predators. For IT managers, it's even worse, as the hyenas of the IP address market seek to pick off the herd's stragglers, the lionesses of the press seek to ambush them and the alligators of the corporate law firm seek to haul them into dangerous waters, gripping them in the teeth of a suffocating writ and dragging them into a pool of angry shareholders.

Needless to say the migration to IPv6 is no easy task, writes Jeff Smith, and it's one that organisations need to plan for carefully. Many enterprises and government agencies are delaying the inevitable by finding ways to stretch the usefulness of their existing networks as new IPv4-lengthening technologies arise. But the end of the road will eventually come, however, so what are the fatal traps you must never fall into?

Do your research when upgrading your equipment. This may sound like a no-brainer, but there are many hardware vendors out there that claim their hardware supports all the feature functionality of IPv6 when, in fact, they don't. Although the hardware works on an IPv6 network, it doesn't necessarily support all of the functionality of some IPv4 applications. If your organisation runs many rich applications and is hoping to run them on IPv6 this is an area that will need to be well researched. Otherwise, you could find yourself wandering around in circles, while the tsetse fly of undocumented network slowly eats nto your nervous system.

Avoid any network provider that doesn't operate a dual stack network. A dual-stack network has the ability to route IPv6 and IPv4 side by side on the network so that your wide area network or Internet connection behaves as an IPv4 and IPv6 path simultaneously. Network operators do this for their customers because it allows the customer to test a fully-functioning IPv6 implementation without turning off any of their old IPv4 setup. This also allows the customer to retain access to the parts of the Internet that have not yet transitioned to IPv6. While many providers offer a solution for tunneling IPv6 inside of IPv4, this convenient solution is best for getting initial experience with IPv6 and is less preferable to a dual-stack configuration for a final implementation of IPv6.

Remember, both of these situations can have business-impacting ramifications for some enterprises that are running applications that must work in the new IPv6 environment. Make sure you plan thoroughly. Or you could end up in the jaws of a dilemma!

We must switch to IPv6 before the last rew addresses of IPv4 are swallowed up by rampant global consumerism, says Jeff Smith, Global Crossing's senior director for infrastructure services

When the internet was built they were on version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4). So you would have thought it would be fairly advanced and forward thinking.

But IP4 was designed to cater for only four billion addresses. Bill Gates has got more Facebook friends than that! But 30 years ago, when IPv4 was first introduced, this seemed more than enough for a store of addresses.

When the Internet metaphorically caught fire, all those addresses were soon burned up. In the early 1990s the Internet Engineering Task Force (the industry standards body) identified the problem.

Recognition blem is only half the battle, of course. Taking action is another story.

With over 70 per cent of available addresses assigned to North America, regional distribution was very poor. The soaring populations and economies of India and China exacerbated the problem as they placed enormous demand for Internet access and IPv4 addresses.
Meanwhile, the western world wanted more Internet-dependent devices than ever, a trend that was accelerated when everyone began buying smart phones in 2005.  Add in 4G wireless rollouts and it's no wonder that the end of the road for IPv4 is in sight.

Which would be OK, but people haven't migrated to more practical alternatives, such as IP6. Why? Because they're happy with IP4, for now. Some say widespread shift to IPv6 won't happen until the cost of running on IPv4 starts rising.

(This all sounds like global warming, only for IP addresses - Ed).

Governments are taking heed and have started to encourage the transition to IP6. The developing nations are leading the charge. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments have also championed the rollout. The US government forced contractors to government agencies to be IPv6-ready by the summer of 2008. The EU is reviewing methods to encourage adoption.

But with IPv4 addresses near exhausted, a resolution by all countries to require the migration to IPv6 must be reached sooner, rather than later. Are they doing enough?

Are we going to run out of time?

Tomorrow Jeff Smith will discuss the possible strategies to avert disaster and identify the IP-changer deniers who refuse to accept there's a problem.