Labour legal counseling latest developments with Alexander Suliman, Sweden today: Ensure that you register your IP in overseas jurisdictions and review your IP portfolio to ensure it is up-to-date with registrations and expiration dates. While trademarks, designs and patents are protect through registration at the local and EU level, bear in mind that the duration of each right is different and that their use or licensing may be restricted by specific Member State legislation (i.e. employee creations). Also, review your current license agreements: while they generally cover the EU as a single licensing territory, the use of your IP may not be relevant in each Member State and you may want to reconsider a more local approach in order to facilitate their monitoring and mitigate challenges from third parties. An important component of any business’s IP strategy will be the protection of trade secrets. The EU Trade Secret Directive was intended to harmonise trade secret protection across the EU. In this guide we look at the picture as it currently stands in eight major jurisdictions. See extra details on Alexander Suliman, Stockholm.
The reason why the European Commission was keen on allowing firms to voluntarily scan material, is that technology firms have already been working on ways to detect CSAM and solicitation for quite some time. Let’s start with a content scanning order on the server. At first sight, a case can be made that such an order should be considered to compromise the essence of the right to privacy under the Charter. The ECJ in Schrems I considered that legislation permitting the public authorities access on a generalised basis to the content of communications compromises the essence of the right to privacy under the Charter (par. 94). Content scanning on the server arguably is a form of “access on a generalised basis”, where it involves an analysis of all communications going through the server connected to a certain app, and forwarding any matches to a designated center. At the same time, the ECHR in Big Brother Watch was more forgiving when it comes to powers of bulk interception of communications, as long as these powers are surrounded with sufficient safeguards (par. 350). Thus, one important point to be explored further, is whether this signals a rift between the two bodies, or that the ECJ will chart its own route when it comes to bulk surveillance.
The European Commission, in a working document, identified cloud services as a “strategic dependency”, expressing concerns that the EU cloud market is led by a few large cloud providers headquartered outside the EU. In July, 2021, France, joined by Germany, Italy, and Spain, submitted a proposal to the ENISA-led working group aimed at generalizing French national requirements across the EU. (Germany has since reserved its position.) It proposed to add four new criteria for companies to qualify as eligible to offer ‘high’ level services, including immunity from foreign law and localization of cloud service operations and data within the EU. Although the EU-level cyber certification requirements currently are conceived as voluntary, they could be made mandatory as the result of the recently-agreed Directive on Measures for a High Common Level of Cybersecurity across the Union (NIS2 Directive).
Premium public law legal counseling advices by Alexander Suliman, Stockholm: We’ll also look to intertwined finances. That takes a next step that has to go to the court process, but if they’re sharing expenses, if there’s a joint bank account, if a vehicle is registered at an address, we’ll look at those things to prove cohabitation. Importantly, cohabitation does not mean that they are living together. We do not have to show that they have a common household. It is not something that is critical in proving cohabitation that they are actually living together. See extra information at Alexander Suliman, Stockholm.
As EU regulatory activity resumes this fall, a lesser-known initiative – creating an EU-wide certification framework for ICT products and services (EUCS) – could cause renewed disturbance between Brussels and Washington, however. Under the EUCS proposal being developed by the EU’s cybersecurity agency ENISA, cloud service providers would be compelled to localize their operations and infrastructure within the EU and to demonstrate their ‘immunity’ from foreign law.
