Oficina Ponti

Mobile Wars in Europe

The dispute over the tablet market has not taken a long time to reach the courts. The Netherlands and Germany are the first battlefields but fighting can be extended to other EU countries because of the extraterritorial effects of the application of standards of protection and defense of IP rights in Europe. In the German case, the court of Düsseldorf adopted, this past August, at the request of Apple, a precautionary measure against Samsung, which prohibits the marketing (and assimilated behaviors by Law) of the Galaxy Tab 01/10 developed by the Korean multinational, for community design infringement 00018106-001. The measure is effective throughout the EU except for the Netherlands, where there is another dispute pending between the same parties but, in this case, on infringement of several european patents. These effects, however, are limited to Germany when it comes to products distributed directly by the korean headquarters as a result of the limitations imposed by the international connection rules on the conflict in the courts of the country where Apple has submitted its demand for design infringement, ie Germany. The inconsistences generated from the uneven aplication of the precautionary measure in Europe underlines the importance of a well defined litigation strategy when starting a Pan-European IP dispute if one wants to avoid all the inconvenients generated by the coexistence of multiple jurisdictions in a conflict.