Latest blog articles

  • Can a single colour alone be a trademark? The question is neither new nor unexplored. However, old wine in a new bottle is presented by the General Court in its decision rejecting an attempt to register a shade of colour for inhalers for asthma and related pharmaceutical preparations, reinstating...

  • Using the trade mark of someone else to describe how your own products relate to the trademark products is allowed under certain circumstances. Recently, the law changed in this respect, leaving the application of some factors uncertain.

  • There is value in reflecting on the impact that Covid-19 has on legal education. A first reflection relates to the fact that many state that Covid-19 invites for virtual teaching. Teaching is not virtual, since it is as real as it can get: students and instructors are real, experiences are real.

  • Resilience is a characteristic of codification, since codes tend to change according to time and space: they are far from being eternal or carved in stone. This is evident in Europe, when looking at the recent reforms to the Belgian Civil Code, for example in the area of property law. Resilience is...

  • The Law and Literature (L&L) movement gained momentum in Europe during the past decades, having had so far more exposure on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. L&L offers an open laboratory to create and test knowledge, and the teaching of law should benefit from the genius and creativity of...

  • Comparative law and multiculturalism can evolve together in the classroom at schools of law and result in a fruitful combination. Their interplay should be encouraged.

  • Sovereignty is invoked in many discussions today, from Brexit to Catalan independence, but it is rarely clear what, exactly, those who invoke sovereignty mean by it. For the purposes of understanding, analyzing, and understanding legal phenomena, however, a more precise understanding is necessary.

  • With AI’s recent breakthrough in machine learning, now more than ever inventors are looking for ways to protect AI systems. But obtaining patent protection depends on the right claims.

  • A new copyright reform (Music Modernization Act) was passed in the US Senate in 2018, comprising reforms on the term of protection for works played through online digital music services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora. However, can copyright keep on being repeatedly extended? Is this...

  • E-personhood is a term proposed in a draft report by the EU Parliament, about civil rules and laws on Robotics. This legal status aims at ensuring rights and responsibilities for the most capable AI agents. An intense debate about its usefulness is taking place in the EU.