Strategic Investment Act: The new Act on Strategic Investment in Croatia has achieved its goal of reducing administrative procedures and ensuring the speedy realisation of strategic projects in Croatia. In order to declare a project “strategic,” it must meet several criteria. Foremost, the project must be in accordance with spatial planning regulations. Also, the total amount of capital expense must be HRK 150 million (approx. EUR 19.6 million) or more ...
On January 27, 2014, the parliamentary secretary of the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs tabled five treaties in the House of Commons dealing with intellectual property, of which three relate to trademarks ...
The moniker "spam" for unsolicited and often indiscriminate electronic communications to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups derives from a famous sketch in the British television comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. However, these days spam is no joke. It is a scourge on modern communications ...
Why Proportionality Should Be Considered As Part of the Preservation Parties have a general duty to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information (ESI). This duty, however, is bounded by a proportionality requirement because e-discovery should not be allowed to be the tail that wags the dog. Courts and parties have been adept at applying proportionality requirements to the production of ESI, but they have struggled to apply proportionality to the preservation of ESI ...
We’ve written about the new Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) on more than one occasion. This refers, of course, to the process whereby companies and organisations can register names – generic words, geographical names, brand names - as top level domain names. So, in the same way that there’s long been .com, .net and .info, you can now have .bank, .google and .capetown. Some 1900 applications have already been filed ...
These days, it seems as if every passing week brings with it a new story in the press about the legal risks of engaging with social media. We have heard much recently about the dangers of defamation on Twitter.Earlier this year, Sally Bercow learned to her cost just how easy it can be to libel someone without explicitly accusing them of anything, after sharing a message about Lord McAlpine with her Twitter followers: "Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*" ...
Negotiation of the proposed EU Data Protection Regulation has faltered. While there is still a possibility that the Regulation could be passed before the May 2014 European elections, that looks increasingly remote. The main stumbling block appears to be the difficult issue of the ‘one stop shop’, which has produced deadlock within the Council of Ministers. The ‘one stop shop’ proposal is inherently difficult, but until now has been referenced in somewhat superficial terms ...
The Romanian Government has approved the necessary legislative amendments to create a holding regime in Romania, the ordinance being published in the Official Gazette on Friday, November 15, effective as of January 1st, 2014. The ordinance includes profits tax exemptions for Romanian holding companies as regards revenues from dividends received, revenues from the sale of shares and revenues from the liquidation process ...
On October 22, 2013, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) issued the Preliminary Cybersecurity Framework (the “Preliminary Framework”), as required under Section 7 of the Obama Administration’s February 2013 executive order, Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (the “Executive Order”). The Preliminary Framework includes standards, procedures and processes for reducing cyber risks to critical infrastructure ...
The European Court of Human Rights (the ECHR), in Delfi AS v Estonia, has upheld unanimously a finding of liability against an Internet news portal regarding offensive comments that were posted online by one of its readers. The ECHR held that making Delfi AS liable for the comments was a justified and proportionate interference with its right to freedom of expression and that there was no violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention) ...
The Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) has just enacted a revamped investor residency programme, entitling successful applicants to a permanent residence certificate (PRC). The Qualifying criteria are: Villas a. Investment of not less than $300,000 in actual construction of a new home, or in renovation of a distressed property as a home for the applicant and his or her dependants, on the islands of Grand Turk, Salt Cay, South Caicos, Middle Caicos or North Caicos; or b ...
To the average internet user the few little letters at the end of the domain name they have just searched must seem rather trivial. Little do they know of the struggle of numerous corporations to obtain those little letters in an effort to try to stamp their individuality on the internet. Companies such as "donut.com" (who focus on registering as many as these generic top level domains or gTLDs as possible) insist that "the current Internet namespace, like ...
On 25 January 2012, the European Commission decided that a substantial overhaul of data protection regulation is required and issued its proposals for change. The proposals are currently making their way through the legislative process in Brussels but, once approved, are expected to take effect at some point in 2014 ...
Use of a domain name: is it a form of advertising? Following the decision in Case C-657/11 (Belgian Electronic Sorting Technology BV v Bert Peelaers, Visys NV), the rules of fairness imposed by European Directives 84/450 and 2006/114 on misleading and comparative advertising will extend to cover not just the content of a web site, but the domain name at which it is registered as well. See our commentary here ...
Under EU Directive 2001/29 on the harmonisation of copyright law, Member States grant authors, performers, producers and broadcasting organisations exclusive rights to authorise or prohibit reproductions of their own works ...
Businesses in the UK have for some time been subject to strict rules on misleading advertising, contained in the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008 (the “BPRs”) ...
Introduction:The Consumer Protection Act, Cap. 326D (‘the Act’) aims at protecting consumer rights by, among other things, prohibiting and penalizing the use of unfair contract terms by suppliers of services. The Act is administered and enforced by the Fair Trading Commission (‘the FTC’). This article summarises the effect of the Act on how service providers can legally contract with their customers. This article does not focus on suppliers of goods ...
Personal data regulation is a recently developed topic in the legal realm. In 1970, the first laws on the matter were issued in Europe and North America. Specifically, the first data protection law called the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz was issued in Germany on October 7, 1970, and the same year the United States Congress issued the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which controls the collection, use and redistribution of any consumer information ...
ICANN is expected to announce the first set of successful applications and list of new generic top level domains later this summer. Before the new generic top level domains can be delegated, the applications need to go through an initial evaluation phase and any objections against those applications need to be addressed. Infact, the first decisions on legal rights objections to applications for new generic top level domains were only recently published by WIPO ...
After a slight pause, the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - are continuing on their path to entering the euro zone, which was first entered by Estonia in 2011 ...
South Africa has a rapidly evolving climate change policy environment, which is in-keeping with the country¡¦s view of itself as a developing country leader in the climate change arena. Part of the policy environment includes attention to financial mechanisms that can be marshaled in support of the response to climate change ...
A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) could mean trouble for many Community trade marks. There is now a heightened risk that national courts will invalidate these trade marks if they have not been used extensively enough in the European Union. Is broader protection better? A Community trade mark (CTM) confers protection in all 27 EU member states ...
As Panama became part of a number of industrial property related treaties, our internal laws have become more territorial; the use of a trademark is territorial again and registration becomes imperative for protection. In Panama, as happens in most of the countries around the world, the right to register a trademark is acquired by its first use in commerce ...
