COURT OF JUSTICE

The Court of Justice's Case Law on Free Movement of Goods

The Court of Justice's Case Law on Free Movement of Goods

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to make an analysis on the issue that Court of Justice's case law, on free movement of goods does not leave enough room for the accommodation of national policies. It has noticed that the national policies getting affected by the court of justice's case laws.

Discussion

In the process of implementing the aforementioned principles into Member States' national laws, the European Court of Justice has got considered instrumental in balancing the conflict of implementing the free movement of goods principle while providing the IPRs protection. The EC J has an important duty to enunciate and enforce the principle of supremacy of Community law over national law, which is to eliminate obstacles between Member States and reduce the inconsistency in their national laws. To ensure economic and social progress and to eliminate barriers, the European Community should be governed by its own law with effective enforcement. The rules relating to parallel imports in the European Community have derived from the interplay between national Member States' interests and supranational European Community's interests. In order to remove obstacles to the free movement of intellectual property products caused by different national intellectual property law, 268a Community-wide exhaustion doctrine has established to balance those conflicts and harmonize the exhaustion doctrine throughout Member States. The exhaustion doctrine has primarily considerations as "a mechanism for reconciling the concept of the single market in goods." When problems in interpretation of this doctrine occur at the national level, the EJC has a duty to answer and ensure that such interpretation is consistent with the Community law. The law of the European Community on the question of IPRs is a combination of the principle of the Treaty of Rome, some EC directives, and interpretations of the ECJ.

In the case of parallel imports, besides the EC directives, many rules derive from the ruling of the ECJ decisions because of the balancing role function of the ECJ. Therefore, this thesis will pay attention to the decisions of the ECJ, as well. Studying and analyzing the decisions of the ECJ should be meaningful, because the decrees of court decisions should be considered alongside the Community law when discussing the issues of parallel imports in the European Community.

In relation to copyright, the ECJ recognized the exhaustion doctrine in scope of Community level in Deutsche Gramophone case by holding that the rights of a copyright owner had exhausted after the first sale within the EU. If the IPRs owners consent to such a sale, they cannot bar parallel imports of those goods. In the case, of patent the principle of the Community-wide exhaustion can be found in an ECJ decision, in the Sterling Drug case. The ECJ stated that derogation from the principle of free movement of goods does not have any justification, where the product has put on the market legally by the patentee himself, ...