Brussels, 18/04/2013 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 18 April, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) set aside the judgment of the General Court, ordering the Commission to pay Systran SA lump-sum damages of around €12 million for its machine translation software system called Systran (ruling on case C-103/11 P). Following the conclusions of the Advocate General in this case (see EUROPE 10733), the CJEU considers that the General Court should have declined jurisdiction and invited the parties to refer to the competent national courts, designated by the various contracts concerning the Systran machine translation system, concluded by Systran and the Commission
On 16 December 2010, the General Court found against the Commission for having disclosed Systran know-how without its agreement and selected the Belgian company Gosselies SA (following a call for tender) for taking care of the maintenance and linguistic enhancement for its machine translation system EC-Systran Unix, an offshoot of the Systran Unix software developed by Systran. In its ruling (see EUROPE 10280), it pointed out that: - the litigation was not contractual because the contracts concluded between Systran and the Commission before the call for tender did not cover the question of disclosing Systran know-how to third parties or carrying out work that was likely to damage its intellectual property rights; - Systran was able to benefit from its intellectual property rights with its Systran Unix version to oppose the disclosure to third parties of the EC-Systran Unix version of Systran. The Commission called for this ruling to be set aside and argued that: - the dispute with Systran was indeed due to contractual liability, as illustrated by the contracts concluded between 1975 and 2002 with the company and other documents; - the General Court committed an error in its analysis of the legal nature of the dispute and failed to recognise its own rules of jurisdiction.
The Court followed this line of argument and points out that, when EU courts are appealed to for compensation, as in this case, they must firstly give their verdict on the nature of the litigation in order to determine the level of jurisdiction and proceed to an analysis to establish the character of the contractual liability or not as the case may be and therefore the very nature of the dispute. In that perspective, it must be held that the General Court made a first error of law, in the context of determining its jurisdiction, a detailed examination of the content of the various contractual provisions governing the economic and commercial relations between the WTC/Systran group and the Commission from 1975 to 2002, in order to determine whether the Commission had authorisation to disclose to a third party information protected by copyright and know-how held by Systran in the Systran Unix version of the Systran machine. The General Court also made another error of law, that the existence of those contracts had no effect on the classification of the dispute and that this was not contractual, although various contractual documents relied on by the Commission prove the contrary. Consequently, the CJEU sets aside the decision by the General Court and rules that the EU Courts do not have jurisdiction to hear the action for compensation brought by the Systran group. (FG/transl.fl)