Nowadays, companies let consumers ‘play’ with their trademark: in the ‘Your Nutella – your way’ campaign the customer is invited to create his name label on a Nutella jar in the classic design of the Nutella logo. Nevertheless, there is an enhanced risk of trade mark dilution.
An international working group has engaged in a project to create an international arbitration mechanism for business and stakeholders to resolve issues in the field of business and human rights. This may enable business to live up to its corporate responsibility to respect human rights thereby...
The urgent transition to low-carbon energy systems requires massive investments and international cooperation. Yet chances of collaboration and exchange are growingly difficult in a context where trust is in short supply. How can we understand (dis)trust patterns in this complex domain?
The United States is threatening the multilateral trading system with a World Trade War - a combination of aggressive unilateral trade restrictions and a wilful disabling of the rules-based dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Other WTO Members must unite around a...
On the 8th of December 2017, Mr. Matthijs Geuze, who worked for the WIPO Secretariat during the negotiations of the Geneva Act, held an expert lecture at Maastricht University on the International Registration and Protection of Appellations of Origin and Geographical Indications in the light of the...
Trust in the legal system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has promoted an historic global expansion of trade and investment. That trust is at risk of erosion. The evolutionary role of complexity may hold the key to understanding why.
Public authority increasingly relies on private standards and corporations’ due diligence processes in the regulation of sustainability and human rights in global value chains. How can it ensure that private actors driven by economic considerations are trustworthy in the regulation of their value...
Julia Reda, the only representative of the Pirate Party in the European Parliament, delivered the lecture “Copyright Showdown” at the Faculty of Law and explained how two controversial articles in the proposal might undermine the long-awaited EU copyright reform.
Concluded at the end of 2015, the European Union-Vietnam FTA (EVFTA) has marked a successive breakthrough for the EU in exporting its long-standing sui generis protection of geographical indications (GIs). With respect to the scope of protection, the GI chapter in EVFTA has introduced a peculiar...
The idea floated by a Maastricht doctoral researcher in September 2017 on how to bypass the current deadlock over appointments to the WTO Appellate Body and to avoid a collapse of the WTO dispute settlement system has gained momentum in academic and policymaking circles.
