INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY : SYSTRAN CASE: COURT OF JUSTICE ANNULS GENERAL COURT RULING.

It seems to be a never-ending case. The EU Court of Justice declared, on 18 April, that the EU General Court did not have jurisdiction to rule in the case pitting the European Commission against Systran, the company specialised in machine translation systems, which is primarily a dispute of a contractual nature (Case 103/11 P). The judges endorsed the opinion of the court's advocate-general (see Europolitics 4529), who found that the dispute was primarily contractual in nature, and consequently sent the case back to the national courts with jurisdiction.

Systran, a French firm, and its subsidiary in Luxembourg, obtained compensation from the General Court for an act of counterfeiting related to unauthorised developments of the EC-Systran Unix version of its translation system in connection with an October 2003 tendering procedure organised by the European Commission. The General Court ordered the executive to pay 12,001,000 for infringement of Systran's copyright and know-how on this version (4106).

SERIES OF CONTRACTS

Since 1975, the Commission has used the Systran machine translation system developed by Peter Toma and the US firm World Translation Center Inc (WTC), which in 1986 became Systran Group.

In 1987, it signed a collaboration agreement with Systran for the purpose of adapting the version of the software developed specifically for the European Community - EC Systran mainframe - and developing dictionaries and language routines. According to the contract, Belgian law was to apply to any dispute between the parties. Between 1988 and 1989, four contracts were concluded to obtain a licence to use the Systran software for five additional pairs of languages. In 1991, the Commission terminated this collaboration and, to ensure software maintenance, recruited Systran employees through the Luxembourg-based firms Informalux and Telindus.

In 1997, the executive recontacted Systran for the migration of the EC Systran mainframe to the Systran Unix version developed by the company since 1991, concluding four agreements with the group for this purpose. The first authorised the Commission to use the Systran trade mark and Systran products for its internal purposes, apart from cases where industrial or intellectual property rights already existed. The contract provided that Luxembourg law applied in case of a dispute. The migration contract was due to end on 15 March 2002, at which time Systran was to provide proof of all intellectual and...