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Ewan Nettletonis a solicitor in the Intellectual Property Department at Bristows. He specialises in intellectual property law. He has an MA in chemistry and a D.Phil in protein chemistry.Abstract Recent estimates suggest that spam now accounts for as much as 60 per cent of all global e-mail traffic, 1 ranging from business advertisements to outright fraud. The EU and USA have recently introduced anti-spamming legislation -implementation of Directive 2002/58/EC in the EU and passing of the CAN-SPAM Act in the USA respectively. This paper looks at the difficulties inherent in legislating against spam and assesses how successful the recent legislation is likely to be at stopping the spammers. It also considers the effect the legislaton is likely to have on legitimate marketing companies.

is a trainee at Bristows, who will qualify shortly as an associate in the Commercial Disputes Department. He has a BA in Modern History, and is particularly interested in matters affecting the technology, media and telecommunications sector and the consumer products industries.ABSTRACT Database right has trodden an unsteady course since it was created over a decade ago. Many practitioners wrote off this relatively fl edgling intellectual property right following the European Court of Justice ' s (ECJ) ruling in the British Horseracing Board ( BHB ) and Fixtures Marketing cases, which seemed to severely curtail the protection it affords. However, the more recent ruling from the ECJ in the Directmedia case reinvigorated interest in the right, confi rming that the acts that can infringe it are broad. Hot on the heels of Directmedia comes the most recent ECJ decision on database right, Apis v. Lakorda , a referral from the national courts of recent EU entrant, Bulgaria. This article considers where Bulgaria ' s fi rst intellectual property referral to the ECJ leaves database owners.

As with many other areas of the law, whether a patent actually covers a program for a computer is not necessarily a simple question. The European Patent Office (EPO) was thought to have granted over 30,000 software-related patents by February 2002 2 and a more recent estimate puts the figure at 50,000-all of which, it has been suggested, have a potentially questionable legal basis. 3 It is therefore unsurprising that several years ago the European Commission proposed a Directive on the patentability of computer implemented inventions, 4 the principal aim of which was to clarify the law in this area. What perhaps came as more of a shock was the fervent debate 93

In March 2004, a hearing took place at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concerning database right and interpretation of the Database Directive.1 Questions had been referred by the national courts of the UK, Finland, Greece and Sweden that had wide-ranging implications for the protection that databases receive in Europe. As described previously in this journal,