After 10 years of proceedings, the Brussels Enterprise Court ruled in favour of our client, a parallel trader of shoes, against the trademark holder in counterfeit proceedings. The Court ruled that the trademark holder failed to prove that the shoes sold by the parallel trader were counterfeit, as it refused to provide any list of authenticity markers for its shoes and only relied on witness statements by its own employees. The Court also held that the trademark holder bears the burden of proof regarding the exhaustion of trademark rights as the shoes were put on the market through an exclusive distribution system, hence creating a risk of partitioning national markets.
The trademark holder also lodged a criminal complaint with regard to the authenticity of certain exhibits used by the parallel trader, and asked for the suspension of the civil proceedings while awaiting the results of the criminal complaint. As many years had lapsed between the first use of the exhibits in the procedure and the filing of the criminal complaint, the Court ruled that the trademark holder’s conduct did not correspond to the reasonable conduct that can be expected from a party in judicial proceedings. All claims of the trademark holder were dismissed.
The judgment can be found here.
Jeff Keustermans and Karel Janssens represented the parallel trader in these proceedings.