A couple of months ago the Court of Justice decided in case C-57/15 between United Video Properties and Telenet that in IP related litigation the successful party can claim a significant and appropriate part of the reasonable costs it incurred for attorneys and technical advisers such as patent attorneys.

Back in 2007 the patent income deduction (PID) was introduced in Belgium, a fiscal benefit intended to stimulate innovation in Belgian enterprises. This system allowed a deduction of 80% of the gross income resulting out of a patent, thereby reducing the effective tax rate to a maximum of 6,8%. This could be cumulated with other benefits such as notional interest, allowing to even further reduce fiscal pressure.

At the end of January the German Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) came with an interesting judgment relating to the “finding friends” function offered by Facebook. Although at first glance this seems to be completely harmless, this proves to be illicit nonetheless, since it constitutes a form of aggressive advertisement.

In the past weeks Belgian phone numbers were overwhelmed by a wave of so-called “ping call” fraud, which has duped an estimated 10% of all people that have been contacted. Reason enough for our minister of telecommunications Alexander De Croo to undertake action and prepare a new law that should take care of this situation.

In June last year the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) scared the operators of online news portals by rendering the so-called Delfi judgment that confirmed that freedom of speech does not prevent those platforms from being held liable for illegal comments posted by users. This month however the Court came with a new similar judgment that seems the weaken the effects of Delfi.

It’s a problem that occurs more often than most are willing to admit: forgetting to register a community trademark license in the register. Although this is a simple formality, not taking care of it means the license will not have effect vis-à-vis third parties and this can result in some very annoying consequences.

The European Commission has announced via a press release that it has reached an agreement with the United States that will make transatlantic personal data flows possible again. Such a framework was badly needed since the European Court of Justice annulled the legal basis of the safe harbor system which left everyone scratching their head on how EU personal data could still be processed in the US.

According to the Brussels Court of Appeal Sabam can deliver the proof of its representative authority by simply referring to the list of rights holders that is submitted with the Monitoring department at the FPS Economy. Therefore it is not necessary to provide the membership agreement or excerpts thereof to the debtor of copyrights.

Last week the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rendered a judgment that has gotten quite some attention in mainstream media. The Court decided that an employer can indeed under certain circumstances monitor the electronic communications of its employees. This can however hardly be considered as a surprise.

In two remarkable judgments the Court of Cassation has ruled that courts can mitigate excessive non-compete clauses by only declaring the excessive part as void and null so the remaining part can survive. This breaks with the viewpoint that these clauses are a matter of all or nothing, meaning they are either valid in their entirety or they are not.