According to Article 61 of the EU Treaty one of the goals of the Community is establishing an „area of freedom, security and justice“. It is in this context that the Commission is presently engaged with a comprehensive reform of private international law in the area of the law of obligations. On the occasion of the 2002 publishing of a first consultation on a draft proposal for a Council Regulation on the law applicable to non-contractual obligations (Rome II), the Institute, under the guidance of Jürgen Basedow, along with the Department of Foreign Private and Private International Law of the University of Hamburg joined together to form the “Hamburg Group for Private International Law” and prepared a comprehensive commentary on the Commission’s draft proposal including precise recommendations for alternative and supplemental provisions.  In several rounds of discussion that spanned over the summer of 2002, the group debated the private international law of tort liability, unjustified enrichment and negotiorum gestio and ultimately deviated from or, respectively, moved beyond the draft proposal of the Commission on many points. Notably, in their subsequent proposals the Commission followed many of the recommendations put forward by the Hamburg Group for Private International Law (Cf. COM (2003) 427 final, COM (2006) 83 final and the common position of the European Parliament and the Council in O.J. EC 2006 C 289E, p. 68).  In particular, the Hamburg Group’s proposal for a special conflict of laws rule concerning the infringement of intellectual property rights was adopted nearly word-for-word even though the Commission’s original draft proposal did not consider intellectual property law at all.

The comments of the Hamburg Group for Private International Law were published in English in RabelsZ 67 (2003) pp. 1-56 and are available below as a PDF download.

Further and more comprehensive research on the private international law aspects of intellectual property rights is currently being undertaken as a cooperative effort of the Hamburg Max Planck Institute and the Munich Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property.

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