Latest blog articles

How does EU consumer laws address dark patterns on the Internet? This topic has been part of the scholarly debate during the panel discussion “The AI-assisted consumer”, organized on 6 December 2022 in collaboration with Glaw-Net and IGIR.

The widespread use of AI-assisted technologies in the digital sphere has given rise to the concept of digital vulnerability, as a contextual vulnerability experienced by internet users. This phenomenon sparks debate about whether the current legislative framework is sufficient to ensure effective...

“Life happens when you are busy making plans”, John Lennon once said. To his chagrin, Boris Johnson, who was counting on winning a third term (despite only being two years into his first), realized that Lennon certainly had a point there. What we witnessed in frenzied television reports from London...

In the 1980s, in the heyday of Thatcherism, Scottish actor Ian Richardson starred in the leading role of Francis Urquhart in the BBC series House of Cards. In it, Urquhart, who starts out as the Chief Whip for the Conservative government led by Thatcher’s fictional successor, schemes against and...

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?

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.