©-LAW

Yesterday the stunning London offices of Simmons & Simmons hosted a  panel discussion  on  the implications of the recent   Court of Appeal judgment   in  Cartier  [ here ] .  The debate also included the question of who should bear the costs of a blocking injunction: should it be intermediaries or rightholders? The  Cartier  decision and the dissent on costs In its ruling the Court of Appeal upheld the  decision  of Arnold J at first instance  [noted  here  and  here ]  and confirmed that blocking injunctions can be also sought in online trade mark cases, even lacking an express implementation into UK law of the third sentence of Article 11 of the  Enforcement Directive  (" Member States shall also ensure that rightholders are in a position to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe an intellectual property rig...

A nice surprise for Cartier and friends Can injunctions (particularly: blocking injunctions) be issued against intermediaries in  trade mark cases, even lacking in the UK a specific implementation of the third sentence in Article 11 of the  Enforcement Directive ? The High Court judgment Back in 2014 the High Court of Justice of England and Wales (Arnold J) answered this question in the affirmative in its judgment in  Cartier and Others v BSkyB and Others   [noted  here  and  here ] . Unlike copyright  [in relation to which the possibility of injunctions against intermediaries is expressly envisaged by  s97A  of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), through which the UK implemented Article 8(3) of the  InfoSoc Directive  into its own national law] , at the time of transposing the Enforcement Directive into its own law UK Government thought that it did not need to take any action to trans...