Latest blog articles

  • On 10 October 2022 MEP René Repasi lodged an action for annulment against the complementary taxonomy delegated regulation 2022/1214. The same regulation is also challenged by Austria, a privileged applicant under Article 263 TFEU. As a result, the General Court will in any event be required to...

  • Questions surrounding how the EU budget is spent or audited have been, and will always be, of interest to EU citizens. Formally, the responsibility for the implementation of the budget rests with the Commission, but it is well known that the Member States have a crucial role to play, especially in...

  • On 4 March 2021, Italy decided to block a shipment of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine that was destined for Australia. This remarkable move, notably made in response to AstraZeneca’s delay in providing the agreed doses of vaccines by the set deadlines, is the first of its kind since the...

  • 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.

  • The ECtHR’s Satamedia judgment juxtaposes issues of data protection and freedom of expression relating to the (re-)publication of public tax data.

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    Absurd claim

    On 9 April 2011 a gunman killed 6 people in a shopping mall in the Dutch town of Alphen aan den Rijn. A group of victims now claims damages from the gunman’s parents, claiming that they should have prevented their son from this horrendous act. The claim will fail: on the facts of the case, there is...

  • The difficult thing about the Brexit referendum and the events that followed in the United Kingdom is that the instrument of a referendum, in all its simplicty, may have undemocratic consequences... This blog is only available in Dutch.