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Merpel will be also spending the weekend shopping for (stiletto heel) shoes   Last year The IPKat   reported   on a new referral to the Court of Justice of European Union (CJEU) from Luxembourg’s Tribunal d’arrondissement, asking whether the operator of a hybrid marketplace could be considered directly liable for trade mark infringement due to the presence of third-party listings of infringing goods on its platform. That referral ( C-148/21 ) has now been joined to another one ( C-184/21 ) made in separate but highly similar proceedings pending between the same parties (Louboutin and Amazon) before the Tribunal de l’entreprise francophone de Bruxelles. In a nutshell, these joined cases are asking the CJEU to determine whether and, if so, at what conditions the operator of an online marketplace may be found liable under Article 9(2) of the  EU Trade Mark Regulation 2017/1001  (EUTMR) for the display of advertisements and the delivery of infringing goods that are offered for sale and pla

  A few days ago the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rendered its   judgment in C-433/20  Austro-Mechana , ruling that the notion of reproduction ‘on any medium’ extends to the cloud and, therefore, that private copying under Article 5(2)(b) of the   InfoSoc Directive   also applies in that context. Kat cloud ... The judgment is in line with last year’s  Opinion  of Advocate General (AG) Hogan  [ here ]  and clarifies the treatment of private copying in the context of cloud computing, this being something that had been previously asked to the Court (in the context of the  VCAST  referral:  here ), but which the CJEU did not expressly address, preferring instead to focus on the qualification of providers of cloud-based storage facilities that give access to protected content to users based in territories for which no licence is in place. Background This referral from Austria was made in the context of litigation between copyright collecting society Austro-Mechana and cloud