Competition Law

Even in times of the "eSports Winter," the gaming industry continues to grow steadily and has become one of the largest entertainment media in the world. Last year alone, the industry's revenue in Germany rose to nearly 10 billion euros. Innovative game concepts and unique game designs are crucial for the success of video games. The competition for media attention and players is fierce. It is not uncommon for basic concepts and game ideas of successful games to be adopted by competitors to offer similar games and benefit from the hype of the original game. It is therefore not surprising that legal proceedings in the industry are also increasing. The Cologne Regional Court recently dealt comprehensively with the copyright protection of game concepts and the limits of imitation.

Wenn die Werbung für ein Produkt lauterkeitsrechtlich verboten wurde, muss der Schuldner das Werbematerials entfernen lassen.

The geoblocking mechanisms used by Valve, the operator of the "Steam" platform, and several publishers on Steam constitute an impermissible restriction of the free internal market. At least, that is how the Court of Justice of the European Union (EuG) saw it, demonstrating that geoblocking is not completely free in the EU. In particular, the ECJ clarified that the protection of copyrights cannot per se lead to admissibility

Contract and competition law issues are of immense importance in the metaverse. Which law governs contracts concluded in the metaverse? How do metaverse-internal and metaverse-external contracts differ? Can traders in the metaverse compete with traders of real goods? Many questions remain unanswered at present and it remains to be seen how they will be answered.

Is the discounter damaging the brand's reputation? Aldi Süd was successfully ordered by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court to cease selling perfume products of the JOOP! and Calvin Klein brands.

In video games, artificial intelligence (AI) has not been a foreign word for a long time. NPCs (non-player characters) and bots have always been described as AI. But the advances in the sphere of actually capable, generative AI, such as the proprietary tools for AI game development called NVIDIA Omniverse ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) announced by graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA the Computex 2023.

As soon as something like the metaverse is on everyone's lips, we lawyers are on hand to start sorting out the legal issues. What threatens us, what needs to be regulated, what is already regulated? In a 5-part series of articles (GRUR-Prax issues 16-17 to 21), we present legal aspects from the areas of trademark and copyright law, competition law and data protection law that are already relevant or will become relevant in the metaverse/Web 3.0. We start off with an overview article.

The Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf (judgment of July 6, 2023 - 20 U 72/22) has ruled that a product advertisement with the claim "climate neutral" must not leave the consumer in doubt as to whether this climate neutrality is already achieved during the manufacturing process or only through compensatory measures.

A trade association is only authorised to initiate regulatory proceedings if it is registered in the lists of the UWG reform by the Federal Office of Justice (BfJ).