As in other fields of the law, in recent years many essential issues

relating to Intellectual Property law have been resolved by important

decisions of the European Court of Justice. This book contains over

forty "landmark" decisions with respect to copyright, trade marks,

databases and design rights, as ruled upon by the European

Court of Justice in recent years.

Authors

Harmonisation of IP law and the creation of the biggest single market in the world

has brought both opportunities and threats. A field in which harmonisation

of IP law is pre-eminent, is customs surveillance on counterfeiting. In 2008

the CAPIP member firms understood the opportunities and created a unique

coalition of 24 law firms with offices in 35 European jurisdictions to fight

counterfeiting side by side with customs authorities.

This cooperation 'in practice' and the shared interest in the further

harmonisation of IP laws has led to this book, the first of a series, providing

inside views on the most important IP decisions of the European Court of

Justice in recent years.

As each decision gives the answers to specific questions related to

a dispute before a national court in a particular Member State, the

editors have, as much as possible, looked for authors within CAPIP who

are familiar with the relevant national jurisdiction, to summarise and

analyse the decisions. Such authors know their legal system and are

best placed to explain the history of the national case, as they can read

the original language in which the dispute has arisen.

Editors

Peter Claassen studied law at Nijmegen University where he obtained

his Masters degree. In addition Peter obtained an LLM degree at Miami

Law School. Peter is a partner at AKD (the Netherlands) and chairs

the IP&T practice group. He has been involved in a great number of

complicated and ground breaking proceedings going up to the European

Court of Justice.

Jeff Keustermans is a member of the Brussels and the New York Bar. He

studied law in Antwerp, Leuven and Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.). Jeff is head of

the IP/IT Department of & De Bandt advocaten | avocats in Brussels, and a

guest lecturer at various universities. He has published over 50 articles and

several books on Belgian and European law relating to IP and IT law.