competitionlaw

In the Kajman case (Eugenia Mocek, Jadwiga Wenta KAJMAN v OHIM and Lacoste, ECLI:EU:T:2015:738, T-364/13 General Court of the EU, 30 September 2015) the General Court of the EU (GC) has confirmed the OHIM rejection of the application for the registration of a mark similar to the iconic Lacoste logo for leather goods, clothing and footwear because there was a likelihood of confusion arising out of an average conceptual similarity and the high distinctiveness of the Lacoste mark. The article is published here .  

The Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has closed by a commitment decision an Article 101 TFEU investigation into a co-marketing agreement. The parties offered to amend the agreement by removing and eliminating the clauses of the agreement that were thought to be conducive to market sharing between the parties. Arguably, the ICA saw that the co-marketing agreements might have pro-competitive effects if they are not price-fixing or market sharing arrangements in disguise. The article is published here.

The Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has opened an Article 102 TFEU investigation against Net Services (NS), a provider for IT services for the implementation of the system for the newly introduced on-line civil trial ( decision of 11 May 2016, Case A490). Being the awardee of some public contracts, NS had the exclusive for the supply of IT services for the management of the platform required for the working of the on-line civil trial. NS was also an important player in the downstream competitive market for the supply of application software. The ICA focused on the discriminatory conducts carried out by NS against its competitors in the dowstreamt. First, NS failed to give competitors in a timely and complete way all the technical information required to ensure the full interoperability between the NS platform and the competitors’ software. Second, NS made available to competitors a model office different from that it used to develop its own application software. Third, NS install