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In today’s data-driven economy, it is essential for companies to protect their trade secrets against unlawful acquisition, use and disclosure; with the ease of digital communications, employee migration and international trade, trade secret violations now often occur across national borders. This book examines how trade secret protection can differ across jurisdictions, where trade secret holders can bring proceedings, and which country’s law is applicable. The book provides a European perspective, analysing how the EU’s rules on jurisdiction and applicable law relate to the EU’s wider objectives of encouraging cross-border innovation activities. Using common trade secret scenarios as a springboard for analysis, this book questions whether EU private international law rules can be interpreted to facilitate the objectives of the EU Trade Secret Directive and in doing so it sets out a detailed examination of both regimes.

Rule of Law as a legal concept has been highly debated in the past decade, not least due to the current backslide in democratic ideals being witnessed in Europe and globally. While the Rule of Law is the backbone on which the modern state and its apparatus is built, what the concept actually entails remains rather unclear. Even non-democratic legal cultures often proclaim their adherence to the Rule of Law. In addition, it is an unsolved dilemma whether Rule of Law is the same or overlaps with the idea of Rechtsstaat. In this sixty-ninth volume in the series, Scandinavian Studies in Law, scholars from the Nordic countries reflect on whether and how the recent societal developments have affected the concept of Rule of Law within their respective fields. A recurring theme in the contributions is that the current Rule of Law debate has affected the Nordic legal orders not merely within individual legal fields, but in a more structural manner.

This report describes the Swedish rules on international jurisdiction over non-EU defendants and their application by the Swedish courts.

Encryption’s ‘going dark’ debate concerns the availability and seamless use of strong forms of encryption to the general public, and its negative effects on law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In debating appropriate regulatory approaches, commentators typically reach for a privacy vs security heuristic: agencies tend to advance policies that privilege security over privacy, and their critics advance the opposite. However, critics of encryption have recently used ‘rule of law’ rhetoric to bolster arguments that more needs to be done to curb encryption’s perceived harms. This paper discusses whether such invocations of the ‘rule of law’ are disingenuous political rhetoric, or are worthy of attention given understandings of the rule of law paradigm in present-day discourse.

A breach of certain clauses in a license agreement may give rise to ‘concurrent liability' in contract and in intellectual property (IP) law. For instance, if a licensor discovers that its licensee uses the registered design or trademark for a range of products not covered by the license, these uses of the design or the trademark may constitute both a breach of contract and an infringement of the right holder’s exclusive right protected by the applicable design or trademark law. Under the law of many legal systems, the licensor (who is also the right holder) may be permitted to frame its action as one in contract or one in IP law, or both, in order to increase its chances of success on the merits and to obtain the most effective remedy. If the dispute between the licensor and the licensee has cross-border elements questions arise concerning which courts have international jurisdiction. Pursuant to Article 7(1) BIa, ‘a matter relating to a contract’ may be brought ‘in the courts for the place of performance of the obligation in question´ (forum solutionis) and pursuant to Article 7(2) BIa, ‘matters relating to tort, delict or quasi-delict’ may be brought ‘in the courts for the place where the harmful event occurred or may occur’ (forum delicti). As these rules have different connecting factors, they might be located in different Member States. The CJEU has held that a matter might fall under Article 7(1) or Article 7(2) but it cannot fall under both. In addition, the CJEU has declined to interpret Article 7 so as to confer accessory jurisdiction (Annex Kompetenz) so that a court having jurisdiction pursuant to Article 7(2) over the IP claim will not have jurisdiction over related contract claim (and vice versa). The purpose of this article is to analyse whether the licensor can choose its preferred Member State by the way it frames its cause of action (i.e. in contract or in IP law).

In Gtflix Tv v DR, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down an important decision confirming the mosaic approach and the accessibility approach to the application of the damage head of jurisdiction to infringements of personality rights on the internet pursuant to Article 7(2) of the Brussels Ia Regulation. Pursuant to the mosaic approach, an injured party can bring proceedings in every Member State where the damage occurs but only with respect to the damage taking place in that Member State’s territory. Pursuant to the accessibility approach, the sole criterium for the occurrence of damage in a Member State is that the content that is placed online ‘is or has been accessible’ in that Member State. Both these approaches have been criticised by commentators and resisted by the Member States courts. Nevertheless, the CJEU arguably forges new ground as the decision seems to expand the mosaic and accessibility approaches into the realm of unfair competition law. Lastly, questions remain concerning whether the courts of the Member State where the damage occurred have jurisdiction to order other territorially limited remedies such as geo-blocking measures, in additionto compensation for damage.

Animal law – legal scholarship focusing on animals in their own right – is on the rise. Traditionally, animals have been hidden within more established fields of law. In property law, for instance, animals have simply been treated as pieces of property. However, an increasing number of scholars now understand the legal status of animals as a distinct legal issue. This volume presents 13 articles on animal law and animal rights. The contributions address these topics from a wide variety of angles, from the doctrinal analysis of current animal law to the philosophical examination of the idea of animal rights. The volume is organized into three parts: “Animal Law: A Field of Law in the Making”, “Animals in Nordic Legal Systems” and “Philosophical and Empirical Approaches”.

The online exploitation of copyright-protected content frustrates its effective enforcement. This is because the global reach of the internet stands in stark contrast to the territoriality principle of international copyright law, whereby each State determines whether and the extent to which content is protected within its own territorial borders. When protected content is exploited online, it has the potential to infringe in every State where the content is accessible. This poses a challenge for private international law because its rules are based on localizing connecting factors within a geographical territory. These rules can be difficult to apply in an online copyright case because the infringement can be ubiquitous. This chapter describes how the European Union (EU) rules on jurisdiction and applicable law apply to online copyright infringement cases and analyzes whether the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU) interpretations of these rules fulfil the underlying objectives of private international law. Lastly, the chapter provides some perspectives for the future.

This article describes and evaluates the reforms that the authors (as course managers) introduced to enhance critical thinking in the compulsory course on private international law in the Master of Laws programme at Stockholm University. The reforms were made in response to a decision by the Stockholm University Law Faculty Board to develop the “Stockholm Model” in an effort to strengthen students’ critical and scientific approach to law. The Stockholm Model aims to place law in a broader context so students can understand its relation to and impact on society. It also shifts the focus from an orthodox teaching of the doctrinal subject areas to facilitating the students’ ability to apply legal and other social science methods to analyse and develop the law. The article evaluates the success of the measures and reflects on what more can be done to improve critical thinking.

The Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU) judgment in AMS Neve and others (C-172/18) clarifies how to interpret the concept ‘the Member State in which the act of infringement has been committed or threatened’ in the rule on special jurisdiction in the European Union Trade Mark Regulation. The CJEU held that Art. 125(5) should be interpreted to mean that the right holder may bring an action before an EU trade mark court of the Member State within which the consumers or traders to whom advertising and offers for sale are directed are located, even if the defendant took decisions and steps in another Member State to bring about that electronic display. With this judgment the CJEU introduces a targeting approach, which is something it has declined to do for the corresponding rule in Art. 7(2) Brussels Recast that applies to infringements of national trade marks. While the targeting approach is encouraging, the CJEU will need to clarify it to fulfil the objective of legal certainty. In addition, the CJEU appears to have interpreted Art. 125(5) EUTMR to exclude the Member State of activation. This is in contrast to Art. 7(2) Brussels Recast, which gives a right holder a choice between the Member State of activation and the Member State where the trade mark is registered. The article concludes that there is no justification for these differences in the special rules on jurisdiction applicable to EU trade marks and national trades.

Although none of the Scandinavian countries have had armed conflicts on their soil since the Second World War, there are in Scandinavia at present war criminals, and witnesses and victims of atrocity crimes. The crimes have been committed in different situations outside Scandinavia and it is only lately that the investigation and prosecution of these crimes have gained adequate attention. This volume presents 21 articles on the investigation and prosecution in Scandinavia of international crimes. The articles present decisions and cases tried at domestic level in a thematic manner, by examining some overarching questions. For instance, to what extent and how international law sources are considered and/or implemented in the Scandinavian countries and how the objectives of international criminal law are brought into action. The volume is organized into five parts: Introduction, General Principles and Matters of Criminal Law, International Crimes, Procedural Matters, and Comparative Outlook.

The new European Union (EU) Regulation on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (hereinafter “General Data Protection Regulation or “GDPR”) aims to strengthen individual rights for the protection of personal data by, inter alia, facilitating private enforcement actions. To this end, the GDPR clarifies the data subject’s right to a direct and independent private enforcement action directly against the controller or processer. As the infringement of personal data rights increasingly takes on cross border dimensions, the GDPR sets out rules on jurisdiction allowing the data subject to bring a private enforcement action in the Member State where the offending controller or processor has its establishment, or alternatively in the Member State where the data subject has his or her habitual residence. The aim of this article is to analyze the jurisdictional options available to a data subject to bring a private enforcement action to enforce his/her data protection rights before the GDPR, under the Member States’ general rules on jurisdiction in private international law, and after the GDPR, under the GDPR’s own rules on jurisdiction. In addition, the article analyzes whether the new rules on jurisdiction in the GDPR supplement or supplant the Member States’ general rules on jurisdiction. The article discusses and analyzes the areas where the application and interpretation of the rules are unclear, and proposes interpretations that best serve the objectives of the GDPR to strengthen the rights of data subjects by facilitating private enforcement actions without jeopardizing the principle of legal certainty deemed necessary for the free movement of data within the EU.