‘Abuse of Rights’ in Belgian and French Patent Law – A Case Law Analysis

This paper examines what types of actions undertaken by patent holders have been considered as abusive in the framework of French and Belgian patent litigation. Particular attention is given to the principle of the prohibition of “abuse of rights” (AoR). In the jurisdictions under scrutiny, the principle of AoR is essentially a jurisprudential construction in cases where judges faced a particular set of circumstances for which no codified rules were available. To investigate how judges deal with the prohibition of AoR in patent litigation and taking into account the jurisprudential nature of the principle, an in-depth and comparative case law analysis has been conducted. Although the number of cases in which patent holders have been sanctioned for such abuses is not overabundant, they do provide sufficient leads on what is understood by Belgian and French courts to constitute an abuse of patent rights. From this comparative analysis, useful lessons can be learned for the interpretation of the ambiguous notion of ‘abuse’ from a broader perspective.

Thin Capitalization Rules and Entrepreneurial Capital Structure Decisions

Tax planners often choose debt over equity financing. As this has led to increased corporate debt financing, many countries have introduced thin capitalization rules to secure their tax revenues. In a general capital structure model we analyze if thin capitalization rules affect dividend and financing decisions, and whether they can partially explain why corporations receive both debt and equity capital. We model the Belgian, German and Italian rules as examples. We find that the so-called Miller equilibrium and definite financing effects depend significantly on the underlying tax system. Further, our results are useful for the treasury to decide what thin capitalization type to implement.

Google face à la justice française et belge Nouvelles décisions en matière de droit d’auteur

Internet Service Providers’ liability for copyright infringement is a debated issue in France and Belgium, particularly with respect to intermediaries such as providers of hyperlinks and location tool services for which the e-commerce directive does not set explicitly any exemption from liability. Thus, the question arises among other things whether the safe harbour provisions provided for in respect of caching and hosting also could apply to search engines. French and Belgian Courts had recently to decide on this issue in several cases concerning Google’s complementary tools such as Google Videos, Google Images, Google Suggest and Google News. This article seeks to give a summary of and to assess this recent case law.