Our colleague Dr. Mireille van Eechoud, currently of double affiliation as an Associate Professor at the Institute for Information Law, Universiteit van Amsterdam and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, was kind to share with us her views on the Painer case (Case C-145/10) and its relation to the preceding EU Court of Justice case law on the matter. Here is her full opinion:

Could the CJEU’s new stance on art. 6(1) Brussels Regulation 44/2001 be explained by the fact that the Court is very activist of late in shaping areas of copyright law which were not considered harmonized – of which the Painer case is itself an example? Or has the Court taken to heart the criticism unleashed by its Roche judgment on multiple defendants jurisdiction? The Advocate General certainly seemed to, citing among others the position of the European Max Planck Group on Conflict of Laws in Intellectual Property (CLIP). Whatever the reason, the Painer judgment from 1 December 2011 (Case C-145/10) signals a departure from the strict formalist-territorial approach to jurisdiction in intellectual property matters. The Court says that joining defendants under art. 6(1) Brussels Regulation is not precluded ‘solely because actions against several defendants for substantially identical copyright infringements are brought on national legal grounds which vary according to the Member States concerned’.  Read more...

A recently published and very interesting case note by Jens Adolphsen (Gießen) deals critically with the two recent and much discussed ECJ decisions on patent litigation – "GAT" and "Roche" – by arguing both decisions illustrated that effective infringement proceedings in intellectual property matters are not possible on the basis of the Brussels I Regulation.

Adolphsen starts his annotation by an analysis of the ECJ's reasoning in "GAT". Here the ECJ has held that,

[a]rticle 16 (4) of the Convention of 27 September 1968 on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters […] is to be interpreted as meaning that the rule of exclusive jurisdiction laid down therein concerns all proceedings relating to the registration or validity of a patent, irrespective of whether the issue is raised by way of an action or a plea in objection.  Read more...

It is my pleasure to give notice of a recently published monograph of my colleague Dr. Javier Maseda Rodríguez (Associate Professor of private international law at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), entitled

La ley aplicable a la titularidad original de los derechos de propiedad intelectual sobre las obras creadas en el marco de una relación laboral (The law applicable to the initial ownership of intellectual property rights of works created in the context of an employment relationship).  Read more...