Jurisdiction in cross-border trademark infringements on the internet in the EU

Abstract

The Internet has transformed everything. And the area of intellectual property and private international law are not exceptions. This paper examines how jurisdiction rules, initially designed for offline cases, are applied in the context of online trademark infringement. It has been found that differentiation should be made with respect to national trademarks and the EU ones - Brussels I Recast applies to the former and European Trademark Regulation to the latter. With national trademarks, the jurisdiction may be granted on the basis of defendant's domicile, place of registration, place of activation of infringing content and the place of access to it. The same applies to the EU trademarks, except for the place of access.