This Week in Luxembourg

The Third Chamber denied the appeal of Deutsche Telekom, just like AG Mazák had recommended. (The CFI's ruling is here.) This means that the EU will continue to have two different state agencies supervising regulated industries: the regulator and the Commission's DG Comp (or the national competition authority, of course). Deutsche Telekom could not derive a legitimate expectation of legality from the German Regulator's approval of its pricing scheme. (par. 97-110) Deutsche Telekom v. Commission. (At some point I'm going to write more about this case, I promise.)

UPDATE: There is a post about this case here. It should be noted that I left out the actual substance of the case (i.e. the alleged margin squeeze) on purpose. I don't think that it is the most interesting aspect of the case, being highly fact-specific, and it didn't fit in the limited space that I like to use for any one case. It will however appear in my paper about this case, as it did in the earlier draft paper.

The Grand Chamber this week considered problems of age discrimination, retirement and severance in the German case of Rosenbladt and the Danish Andersen case. Much to the relief of everyone (except me), the Court did not invalidate the mandatory retirement age.

In Nuova Agricast and Cofra v. Commission, the First Chamber sorted out an Italian state aid mess in the context of a damages claim against the Commission. In the middle of it all there an interesting question of legal certainty.

[UPDATE: ECJBlog.com has a post about this case.]

AG Sharpston has an opinion on the law of nobility in EU citizenship law. Austria has always been rather harsh in its rejection of noble titles. (Former nobles aren't even allowed the prefix "von" or "zu".) The AG now argues that the public policy arguments behind this rule are capable of justifying a certain amount of free movement inconvenience, but only to a point. As a final cherry on the pie, there's also a problem about surnames and titles that vary depending on the sex of the person, which of course gets all the Slavic countries very excited. Ilonka Sayn-Wittgenstein.

[UPDATE: ECJBlog.com has a post about this case.]

AG Bot has an opinion on the patentability of Graphical User Interfaces under Directive 91/250, the software patent directive. He doesn't think they are patentable under that directive, but he does think that they are capable of being copyrighted under Directive 2001/29. Bezpečnostní softwarová asociace – Svaz softwarové ochrany v. Ministerstvo kultury (NL, DE, FR)

Finally, AG Kokott has an Aarhus Convention case, specifically an access to documents case under Directive 2003/4. In this case, the information is requested by the City of Lyon, though that is legally irrelevant. The city wants information about the sale of emission rights by certain district heating companies, because they're trying to decide who to award a concession to. She concludes that the Caisse des dépôts et consignations was justified in rejecting access until after the five year confidentiality period of art 10 of Commission Regulation 2216/2004 was over. Ville de Lyon (NL, DE, FR)

P.S. The archive of these emails is here.