With an order dated December 3, 2019 in the proceedings brought by Satispay S.p.a. and Satispay Ltd. against Sisal Group S.p.a., the Court of Milan ascertained that Sisal committed acts of parasitic unfair competition to the detriment of Satispay, ruling on the case with a temporary limited injunction.

By order no. 4721/2020, the Italian Supreme Court recently ruled in favour of the well-known publishing house Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.a., owner of the trademark «Grazia», ascertaining that its trademark was counterfeited by the sign «grazia.net». The three instances of the case are briefly summarised below.

At the end of December 2019, the European Patent Office (EPO) refused two patent applications (No. 18275163 and No. 18275174) filed by Dr Stephen Thaler, in which an artificial intelligence developed by Dr Thaler, named DABUS, was designated as inventor.

The Coronavirus emergency impacts  existing contracts in various ways, in particular for two reasons

With decision (no. 96/2020), published last January 15, the Court of Bologna found that software developed by an external contractor was  owned by the committing company and acknowledged in favour of the company the right to be compensated for damages arising from the contractor’s failure to deliver the source code at the end of the relationship.

On 17 January 2020 the Council of Ministers approved a legislative draft setting out the «regulation of the prohibition of parasitic advertising (ambush marketing)», thus introducing a general and organic discipline of such a phenomenon, no longer related to single events. In fact, in the past, the issue of ambush marketing had been addressed limited to specific sporting events and exhibitions: for instance, Article 3.2 of Law No. 167/2005, introduced in view of the Turin 2006 Olympic Winter Games, prohibited the undertaking of economic activities in parallel to those carried out by the companies authorised by the event organisor subjects. Moreover, there were other attempts to introduce a general regulation of ambush marketing: the first with the legislative draft no. 1620/2008 “Lolli” and the second with the legislative draft no. 1635/2014 “Idem”. However, the two legislative drafts did not complete their legislative process before the end of the legislature in the course of which they were issued.

With decisions no. 231 and 232 of 2019, the Italian Data Protection Authority imposed two substantial fines on the well-known company Eni Gas e Luce (hereinafter “EGL”) amounting to € 3,000,000 and € 8,500,000 at the end of two different proceedings relating to the infringement of data protection laws in the context of the conclusion of unsolicited supply contracts and illicit telemarketing and teleselling activities, respectively.

With two ex parte decrees issued last December 24 and January 13, the IP Court of Milan ruled in favour of the companies Taodue S.r.l. and Medusa Film S.p.a., i.e. the producer and the holder of the distribution rights for the well-known film ‘Tolo Tolo’, in the judgment commenced by the same to fight against certain cases of online piracy.

The event, that will take place on 21 February 2020, is organized by LES International in collaboration with the University of Padua and UniSMART, the tech transfer company of the University of Padua.

With a judgement dated 19 December 2019 (C 263/18) the ECJ issued an important decision concerning the interpretation of Article 2 and Article 3 of Directive 2001/29/EC in relation to the sale of second-hand e-books.

By decision No. 5140/2019 of 12 November 2019, the Turin IP Court issued a decision in a dispute between Ferrero S.p.a. and Mocca S.r.o. Spol in relation to the three-dimensional trademarks consisting of Ferrero’s Tic Tac package.

With the publication of the Guidelines concerning the interpretation of Article 3 of EU Regulation no. 679/2016 (GDPR), the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) provided some clarifications on the territorial scope of the GDPR. Article 3 GDPR, in fact, provides for three different criteria for the application of the European privacy law: 1) the existence of an “establishment” in the EU; 2) the “targeting” criterion; 3) the applicability of a provision of public international law.

On 8 November 2019, the Milan IP Court issued an interesting decision (judgment  no. 10130/2019) on trademark infringement in connection with “copycat” websites.

With the decision of last October 3rd, the European Court of Justice (preliminary ruling C-18/18), provided some clarifications on the interpretation of Article 15(1) of EC Directive no. 2000/31.

Last month, I was invited to speak at the LESI YMC event in London (see here for some details), on a panel featuring some very well reputed foreign colleagues, with whom I discussed the options available for Pan-European patent dispute resolution.

With decision no. 18220/2019, the Italian Supreme Court ruled on the violation of the author’s right of paternity due to the failure to mention their name in the publication of their work by third parties.

With judgement no. 29391 dated 4 July 2019, the Criminal Court of Cassation ruled on the matter of patent infringement pursuant to Article 473 of Italian Criminal Code and rejected the appeal proposed by two companies, namely Roofy S.r.l. and Gestico S.r.l., against the Court of Brindisi’s order that had confirmed the criminal seizure of self-leveling spacers for placing tiles, produced and marketed by the appellants and deemed to infringe the patent owned by the counterparty, a company named Brunoplast s.a.s.

On 12 September, the European Court of Justice issued its decision in the G-Star v. Cofemel case no. 683/17, essentially dealing with the possibility of granting copyright protection to clothing designs.