INTRODUCTION

Arthur Taylor von Mehren was a great scholar of the old school. As Detlef F. Vagts puts it: “He relied on his immense knowledge of comparative law rather than relying on search engines and modern machinery, and he knew an enormous number of people around the world in the field. He was an institution.” Von Mehren did not see retirement as fundamentally changing his life, he wrote: “More than in the past, I shall write about the forests rather than the trees – how they came to be what they are and how to find paths through them.” Unfortunately, we cannot rely anymore on von Mehren to find paths through the dense forest of intellectual property and choice of law. As cross-border conflicts have soared in a world of increased global trade and borderless communication, the relationship between intellectual property and choice of law is becoming more complex. It has become a real challenge to master both fields and to identify appropriate solutions. The following three cases will illustrate the tension between choice of law and intellectual property.

Hotel Maritime

In Hotel Maritime, the owner of German and E.U. trademarks for Maritim, who used the name for a chain of hotels in Germany, sued a Danish defendant who ran a bed and breakfast establishment in Copenhagen. The defendant had registered HOTEL MARITIME as a trademark in Denmark and ran a website using the domain name http:www.hotel-maritime.dk that also included information, in German, about the hotel.