Nicholas Smith

In 1985 Madonna set the pop music world alight with her song “Material Girl”. 

In an earlier post on the Whiteboard, we reported a proposal made at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN, the body that operates the internet domain name system) called the New gTLD program, which would substantially expand the number of general Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) from the current 22, which includes such familiar domains as .com, .org and .net.

In its recent decision in International Hair Cosmetics Group Pty UK v International Hair Cosmetics Limited [2011] FCA 339, the Federal Court unravelled a tangled mess of a hair dispute between two companies with competing claims over a series of trade marks including AFFINAGE.