Latest blog articles

  • Current US and EU secondary liability standards do not address all factors to trigger liability. This influences legislation and case law, setting an uncertain secondary liability outcome of IP infringement cases against Internet Intermediaries’. I suggest that tort law can tackle this problem.

  • Unlike other sectors, improvements in Genetic technology raise issues of morality. The new human gene editing technology CRISPR/CAS9 has raised many such concerns. Can the current patent system deal with these concerns or should morality be dealt with by the inventors themselves?

  • The need to guarantee the free flow of information in a Big Data economy forces us to re-think Intellectual Property Rights and find an appropriate balance between competition, innovation, privacy and incentives.

  • With or without the UK, the EU will try to find a way to implement the UPC as it has invested considerable time and efforts knowing the benefits it will bring; however, the fate of the Agreement could be decided on judicial grounds instead of political ones.

  • It took quite a while before the European countries realized and recognized that the influx from asylum-seekers via the Mediterranean Sea and Turkey into the European Union is not just a matter of controlling the outside borders of the Union, but also a humanitarian and human rights issue. Some...

  • This year we have witnessed an extraordinary and tragic series of events. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have tried to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. The UN estimates that over 2,500 people have lost their lives in the process. In the last few weeks, the focus has shifted to the EU’s...

  • The Nikolova case (C-83/14), currently pending before the Court of Justice (CoJ), constitutes an interesting and unique example of a practice alleged to have discriminatory effects on a large group of persons defined by reference to their Roma ethnic origin. The case sheds light on the role that EU...

  • The European Commission, on behalf of the European Union (EU), monitors and checks on the transposition of EU legislation by Member States. Member States often have to report on the steps they have taken to comply with specific EU legislation and the Commission even occasionally initiates...

  • Last November the Court of Justice ruled in Dano   that EU member states may exclude from entitlement to social assistance nationals of other member states who have arrived in their territory and who have no intentions of finding a job. While the ruling and the Court’s reasoning has triggered much...

  • In a short memo, published on 22 March, the Dutch Liberal Party (VVD) expressed its view on how to handle the increasing number of asylum claims in the Netherlands, and more broadly in the EU, as well as the continuously tragic events concerning refugees that occur at the external borders of the EU...