Judgments Regulation tidied up: 44/2001 is now 1215/2012

Council Regulation 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recog­nition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters has now been recast: prepare to welcome Regulation 1215/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 December 2012 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters, the full text of which was published on the website of the Official Journal of the European Union last week.

To refresh your memories, while the Regulation unsurprisingly deals with many other areas than IP, there are some IP-specific bits that should not be ignored.  Recital 25 in the Preamble reads:

(25) The notion of provisional, including protective, measures should include, for example, protective orders aimed at obtaining information or preserving evidence as referred to in Articles 6 and 7 of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights. It should not include measures which are not of a protective nature, such as measures ordering the hearing of a witness. This should be without prejudice to the application of Council Regulation (EC) No 1206/2001 of 28 May 2001 on cooperation between the courts of the Member States in the taking of evidence in civil or commercial matters.

So far as the substantive provisions of the Regulation are concerned, patents get a special mention in Article 24:

Exclusive jurisdiction 

Article 24 

Another piece of EU
law gets cleaned up 

The following courts of a Member State shall have exclusive jurisdiction, regardless of the domicile of the parties: 

(1) in proceedings which have as their object rights in rem in immovable property or tenancies of immovable property, the courts of the Member State in which the property is situated. 

However, in proceedings which have as their object tenancies of immovable property concluded for temporary private use for a maximum period of six consecutive months, the courts of the Member State in which the defendant is domiciled shall also have jurisdiction, provided that the tenant is a natural person and that the landlord and the tenant are domiciled in the same Member State; 

(2) in proceedings which have as their object the validity of the constitution, the nullity or the dissolution of companies or other legal persons or associations of natural or legal persons, or the validity of the decisions of their organs, the courts of the Member State in which the company, legal person or association has its seat. In order to determine that seat, the court shall apply its rules of private international law; 

(3) in proceedings which have as their object the validity of entries in public registers, the courts of the Member State in which the register is kept; 

(4) in proceedings concerned with the registration or validity of patents, trade marks, designs, or other similar rights required to be deposited or registered, irrespective of whether the issue is raised by way of an action or as a defence, the courts of the Member State in which the deposit or registration has been applied for, has taken place or is under the terms of an instrument of the Union or an international convention deemed to have taken place. 

Without prejudice to the jurisdiction of the European Patent Office under the Convention on the Grant of European Patents, signed at Munich on 5 October 1973, the courts of each Member State shall have exclusive jurisdiction in proceedings concerned with the registration or validity of any European patent granted for that Member State; 

(5) in proceedings concerned with the enforcement of judg­ments, the courts of the Member State in which the judgment has been or is to be enforced.

If the experience of patent litigators is anything like that of their trade mark brethren, the old, un-recast version of the Regulation will continue to be cited for years.