When a company owns the Benelux rights in the design of a chair but then it fails to maintain the registration of its Benelux rights under Benelux law, can a rival company still be stopped from making similar chairs because of the links between the old Benelux law and current EU law? More specifically, what is the relationship between Benelux rights and the EU’s ‘term of protection’ Directive 93/98/EEC?
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Case C-192/15, Rease – secretly spied on, medical data leaked, and left unprotected by the Dutch regulator
Can the Dutch Data Protection Agency exert any control over companies based in the UK and the USA which conduct covert surveillance on Dutch territory? And in the event of an individual’s data processing law rights under Dutch law being breached, what is to be done where the internal rules of the Dutch Data Protection Agency mean that the Agency will never ever act on a complaint coming from an individual?
Continue readingCase C-72/15, Rosneft – challenging the EU’s sectoral sanctions against Russia
Russian activities in Ukraine have prompted the EU to adopt a package of sanctions aimed at various Russians and Russian companies. These sanctions have been enshrined in various pieces of EU legislation and implemented by the EU Member States in their national laws. These sanctions are affecting an oil company which is part-owned by a British oil company ‘BP’, and part-owned by a Russian oil company that belongs to the State of Russia. To begin with, the company is challenging the legality of the UK’s implementing legislation. However, the validity of the EU’s legislation is also at stake. Does the CJEU have jurisdiction to rule on the validity of a Decision adopted pursuant to the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy? And if so, then does the drafting of the EU’s legislation satisfy the requirements of legal certainty and foreseeability in circumstances where that legislation forms the basis of criminal penalties?
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