Practice areas: Intellectual Property
HEMA launched a foldable storage crate on which people can attach their own letters in 2019. The letters for the crate are sold separately. The letter crate with the letters to attach yourself to it looks like this:
Lidl was apparently very keen on this product and launched a similar product three years later:
This was a thorn in HEMA’s side. It believed that Lidl was infringing its (copyright) rights with its crate and claimed before the interim relief judge of the Central Netherlands District Court in 2022 that Lidl would cease its infringements. It also claimed, among other things, that Lidl was ordered to carry out a recall and that the recalled crates would be destroyed.
The court first examined the question whether HEMA’s crate is subject to copyright. To be eligible for copyright protection, a work must be unique and original and bear the creator’s personal stamp . Or in the simpler words of the ECJ: there must be an intellectual creation of its own.
If there is a personal intellectual creation, but that creation consists exclusively of elements necessary to obtain a certain technical effect, copyright protection is still excluded. Nevertheless, even within certain technically inspired design choices, sufficient freedom of choice sometimes remains. Crates have in common that they consist of at least four walls, a bottom and two handles. As a designer, you cannot escape these elements when designing a crate. They provide a usable crate that allows you to lift other items more easily. How exactly these (basically) technically necessary elements are designed can vary, though. HEMA argued that enough free design choices were made in the design of its folding crate. For example, the deliberately chosen horizontal lines would provide a “transparent” appearance.
The interim relief judge of the Central Netherlands District Court agreed. In the design of the folding crate, sufficient design choices would have been made and therefore, according to the interim relief judge, the crate has its own original character and bears the personal stamp of its maker. In short, the interim relief judge ruled that the design of HEMA’s letter crate is protected by copyright. Finally, the preliminary relief judge did note that the crate contains many elements that belong to the “design heritage”. In short, design heritage consists of everything that has been designed before. The copyright protection is therefore limited, according to the interim relief judge.
HEMA’s crate was therefore copyrighted, according to the preliminary relief judge – albeit only to a limited extent. But does Lidl’s crate infringe HEMA’s copyright? The court in preliminary relief proceedings assessed this on the basis of the question whether sufficiently copyrighted features have been copied from a work. In case of utilitarian objects, the so-called total impressions criterion is used to assess this. As the word suggests, the total impressions that two utilitarian objects leave on the public are compared. If it is judged that these impressions are too similar, copyright infringement is established. In that assessment, of course, the (unprotected) elements that are part of the design heritage discussed earlier must again be taken into account. The preliminary relief judge ruled that the overall impressions (as far as protected elements were concerned) of the crates were sufficiently different from each other. No infringement, therefore.
Was that the end of the matter? No. For HEMA did not only argue that Lidl infringed its copyright. It also claimed that HEMA was guilty of slavish imitation. What the hell is that, I hear you think. As a general rule, when a material product is no longer protected by an absolute intellectual property right, imitation is in principle free. It is different, however, if this causes unnecessary confusion. An imitating competitor can be expected – even if the design of a material product is no longer protected by copyright – to do everything that can reasonably be expected of him to avoid causing confusion. However, a condition for relying on slavish imitation is that a product has a distinctive face in the market. According to the preliminary relief judge, this was the case with the HEMA crate. According to the preliminary relief judge, however, Lidl sufficiently distanced itself from HEMA’s crate – when one thinks away the elements that are part of its design heritage. There was therefore no slavish imitation either, according to the interim relief judge.
HEMA disagreed with the ruling of the interim relief judge of the Central Netherlands District Court and went to the Arnhem-Leeuwarden Court of Appeal. The court ruled on 26 September 2023 and followed Lidl in its defence. According to the court, the design of most elements of the crate was mainly determined by technical and functional considerations. Any originality is therefore lacking, according to the court of appeal. Contrary to the court in preliminary relief proceedings, the court of appeal therefore ruled that the design of HEMA’s crate was not protected by copyright.
Bales for the HEMA you might think, but the court of appeal thinks differently about the reliance on slavish imitation. According to the Court of Appeal, Lidl’s letter crate is a copy of the Hema letter crate in almost all respects except the bottom. There may be differences, but according to the court, these are so marginal that they will not be noticed by the unobservant consumer of this type of product. Lidl had also copied the picture used by HEMA on the packaging and, in addition, the letter set supplied by Lidl was almost identical to HEMA’s letter set. According to the court, this was all unnecessary and creates a risk of confusion. In short, success for HEMA on appeal.
This case illustrates it nicely: if a product is no longer protected by an absolute right of intellectual property, that is not a licence to completely imitate that product. One will still have to do everything that can reasonably be expected to avoid confusion.
Door het leggen van conservatoir (derden) beslag worden vermogensbestanddelen van een wederpartij per direct bevroren. Er kan geen overdracht meer plaatsvinden en in bepaalde gevallen kunnen vermogensbestanddelen zelfs elders in bewaring worden gegeven. Deze actie kan druk zetten op de wederpartij waardoor een snelle oplossing kan worden bereikt.
Beslaglegging moet wel altijd worden gevolgd door een bodem of arbitrage procedure, tenzij eerder een buitengerechtelijke oplossing wordt bereikt.
Onterecht leggen van beslag moet worden voorkomen; het kan leiden tot een schadevergoedingsactie.
Wij onderzoeken graag of dit rechtsmiddel in uw situatie tot een spoedige oplossing kan leiden.
Snel een uitspraak nodig van de rechter over een bepaalde urgente situatie? In dat geval is een kort geding een oplossing voor uw situatie. De rechter geeft een voorlopig oordeel waaraan partijen zich al dan niet op straffe van een dwangsom dienen te houden.
Wij denken graag mee over de voor uw situatie passende juridische oplossing.
Dit is in het civiele en bestuurlijke recht de procedure die (al dan niet na hoger beroep) leidt tot een definitieve beslechting van het geschil. Anders dan in een kort geding ligt de nadruk hier veel meer op een schriftelijke uitwisseling van processtukken.
Wij onderzoeken graag of dit de aangewezen procedure is voor uw geschil.
Een partij die zich beroept op de rechtsgevolgen van de door haar gestelde feiten of rechten moet deze bewijzen. Voorafgaand aan iedere gewenste procedure moet derhalve de bewijspositie worden bekeken.
Soms is het bewijs nog niet voldoende in handen van de cliënt. In dat geval is nadere actie gewenst. Te denken valt dan bijvoorbeeld aan het instellen van een (voorlopig) getuigenverhoor of het afdwingen van het verkrijgen van inzage in bepaalde documenten die zich bij de wederpartij bevinden (exhibitieplicht).
Wij zoeken graag met u naar de mogelijkheden om uw bewijsprobleem op te lossen.
Soms ontstaat er in een onderneming een intern geschil tussen aandeelhouders of tussen het bestuur en (enkele) aandeelhouders. Dit kan bijvoorbeeld gaan over de te volgen strategie van de onderneming. In dat geval kan aan de Ondernemingskamer, een speciaal daarvoor geëquipeerde afdeling van het Hof Amsterdam -- bij ons kantoor om de hoek -- een onderzoek naar de gang van zaken binnen de onderneming worden gevraagd. Zo'n onderzoek kan worden voorafgegaan door het vragen van voorlopige voorzieningen, zoals het schorsen van een bestuurder voor de duur van de procedure of het tijdelijk ontnemen van het stemrecht van een aandeelhouder.
Wij denken graag mee over de voor uw situatie passende oplossing.