INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW

The head of the United Nations' intellectual property watchdog will step down next year, a year early, after documents bearing a false birth date brought pressure on him to resign, diplomats said on Thursday.

The recording industry has won a major fight in its effort to stop illegal music downloading with a U.S. jury decision to impose $222,000 damages against a Minnesota woman who used a Web service to share music.

A U.S. jury found that Vonage Holdings Corp had infringed patents owned by Sprint Nextel Corp and ordered the Internet phone company to pay $69.5 million in damages, triggering a 34 percent fall in its shares.

Improving access to medicine could save 10 million lives a year globally, a U.N. health envoy said on Thursday, recommending that drugmakers support research for neglected diseases and cut prices in poor countries.

Video-sharing Web site YouTube said on Wednesday that it has reached a deal with British licensing organizations that collect royalties on behalf of 50,000 composers, songwriters and publishers.

Russian music download site www.allofmp3.com has said it will resume business soon, after a Moscow court ruled its operation is in accordance with Russian law.

With Hollywood bracing for a season of possible labor strife, screenwriters and studio executives on Monday opened contract talks expected to hinge in part on how the Internet has altered show business.

The demand for patents is increasing, with applications for patents doubling in the last 20 years, the UN Intellectual Property Agency said on Monday.

Kuro, one of Taiwan's best-known file-sharing services, has settled with the recording industry on Friday, agreeing to pay a substantial sum as well as shutting down its networks.

Taiwan online music file-sharing network Kuro has agreed to shut down its file swapping service and pay undisclosed damages to settle a recording industry lawsuit, the industry group behind the row said.

German retailer Metro won a long running battle over a trademark with Tesco on Wednesday when Europe's second highest court ruled in its favour.

The explosion in online music sales is set to continue and will start to halt the decline in overall sales of recorded music in Europe, but not until 2010, according to a report on Thursday.

Top music companies are suing the makers of the popular Internet file-sharing program Limewire for copyright infringement.

The SCO Group Inc., currently pursuing a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against IBM over the Linux operating system, announced losses for the second quarter that more than doubled those of the same quarter last year.