Latest blog articles

I am very pleased that today we will start teaching the EU and Global Cybersecurity Fundamentals course within the Advanced Master in Privacy, Cybersecurity and Data Management LLM we created at ECPC. Today we will kick off the course with Brian Honan, who will lecture on the concept of...

Recently, the General Court in the HELL coffee case has confirmed that a descriptive foreign language term (German word HELL) can be granted protection under EU trade mark law (Hell Energy v. EUIPO, T-323/20).

When we talk about Trade Marks Trolls we don’t mean the ugly creature that might come to your mind. Instead, we speak about practices that constitute an abuse of trade mark law. So, how to defend yourself against such behaviour?

When we think of cybersecurity we are generally concerned with the code, algorithms and systems that are responsible for the functioning of out digital technologies and the safety of our sensitive data. What has become increasingly apparent is the role of humans in ensuring the security of our...

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...

After the initial relief that followed upon reaching a Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom on Christmas Eve, we slowly see how this treaty is going to affect the tax domain. In this blog I will briefly focus on the area of fiscal state aid, i.e. the...

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.

Schumacker is one of the most important cases in EU tax law. It opened the door to many more legal proceedings before the CJEU that tested the limits the Member States’ tax sovereignty against the force of EU law.

There has been much brouhaha about equalization levies in the context of the digital economy. One of the hotly debated issues is whether such levies are covered by tax treaties at all. In this post, I should like to reflect over this issue as objectively as possible. I shall not, however, delve into...

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.