MY ACCOUNTOBTAINING AN ADVANTAGE WITHOUT CONSIDERATION
A credit granted by a supplier is deemed to be a benefit obtained without consideration, since the supplier was never in a position to note the alleged non-conformities of the products, to provide explanations or to contest them, whereas the distributor did not express any reservations on receipt of the goods, referred to the defects only in internal exchanges and did not report them to the supplier until one year after receipt of the products.
CA Paris, 19 June 2024, No 21/19201
RESTRICTION BY OBJECT
The General Court failed to observe the principles governing the application and interpretation of Article 101(1) TFEU when, instead of examining the content, background and legal and economic context of out-of-court settlement and the license agreements, as well as the specific characteristics of the market in which their effects would actually be felt, it formulated criteria aimed at identifying, in a general and abstract manner, the conditions under which the combination of a patent settlement agreement and a license agreement relating to the same patent may, on the basis of the legal characteristics of these agreements alone, be classified as a restriction of competition by object, within the meaning of the aforementioned article, thus focusing its analysis on the form and legal characteristics of these agreements, rather than examining their concrete impact on competition.
CJEU, Case C-176/19 P Commission v Servier and Others, Judgment of 27 June 2024
The fact that a market-sharing agreement is not “hermetic” does not prevent it from being classified as a restriction of competition by object, since Article 101(1)(c) TFEU expressly prohibits market-sharing agreements, without limiting this prohibition to agreements which create a “hermetic” division between these markets, for example, by means of provisions reserving access to certain of these markets to one of the undertakings to the exclusion of the other, or prohibiting exports from one market to another.
CJEU, Case C-176/19 P Commission v Servier and Others, Judgment of 27 June 2024
The fact that a commercial strategy under which undertakings operating at the same level of the production chain negotiate such agreements between them in order to put an end to a dispute relating to the validity of a patent is economically rational from the point of view of those undertakings in no way demonstrates that the pursuit of that strategy is justifiable from the point of view of competition law.
CJEU, Case C-176/19 P Commission v Servier and Others, Judgment of 27 June 2024
INVESTIGATIONS
Exchanges prior to the referral of a case to a lawyer, where the latter is neither the sender nor the recipient, cannot fall within the scope of the protection of lawyer-client correspondence.
Cass. crim., 25 June 2024, No 23-81.491
