Joris Deene
No, not exactly. On July 9, 2026, the Court of Justice ruled in the Sky Österreich case (CJEU July 9, 2026, C-234/25) that a streaming subscription with a dynamic selection does not constitute a supply of digital content, but...
Is it permissible to train an AI music generator using existing hits?
Not without a license, once the model can remember those hits and reproduce them in a recognizable way. That was the ruling of the Munich I Regional Court on July 31, 2026, in the case involving the German collecting society GEMA (the Belgian counterpart...
Are AI-generated images of child abuse a criminal offense?
Yes, when the images are realistic. On July 31, 2026, the Court of First Instance of West Flanders, Kortrijk Division, convicted a man who used artificial intelligence to create lifelike images of naked...
Can you have two patents for the same invention?
In Belgium, yes—at least on paper: the Intellectual Property Office grants patents without a substantive examination, so there is nothing to prevent the same applicant from obtaining two patents for the same invention. Both...
Under what circumstances can a luxury brand prohibit an unauthorized seller from selling its perfumes?
In principle, a trademark owner cannot prevent the resale of its products once it has placed them on the market itself within the European Economic Area. Nevertheless, on February 23, the Bergen Court of Appeals ruled...
Are you still allowed to call your product ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘climate-neutral’?
Only with hard evidence from now on. The law of July 22, 2026, transposes the European EmpCo Directive into Belgian law and permanently prohibits a range of environmental claims as of September 27, 2026, without the need to prove that...
What does the invisible AI watermark mean for lawyers?
Since August 2, 2026, the latest AI language models have been embedding an invisible watermark in every piece of text they generate. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude language model, announced in mid-August how it...
Can a competitor extract data from your AI model to train its own?
In late 2025, Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, accused China’s Alibaba in a letter to the U.S. Senate of using 25,000 fake accounts to generate some 28.8 million conversations with...
Should the government ban social media for young people under 15?
Not through a blanket ban, ruled the Conseil constitutionnel, the French Constitutional Court, on August 14, 2026. France was the first EU member state to pass a law banning social media for min...
Is an image on a foreign website sufficient grounds for an injunction in Belgium?
Yes, that should suffice. On July 22, 2026, the presiding judge of the Dutch-language Commercial Court in Brussels issued a cease-and-desist order against two Greek furniture sellers, even though no sales or deliveries in Belgium had been proven...
Who is responsible for proving that a lawyer’s writings are protected by copyright?
A lawyer who reports part of his fees as royalties and thus benefits from the favorable personal income tax regime will, sooner or later, be asked by the tax authorities to prove that his legal texts...
Can you use a historical place name that is also a well-known brand?
Not necessarily. On May 4, 2026, the Brussels Court of Appeals ruled that a campground in Zillebeke may no longer call itself “‘t hof Bellewaerde,” because that name conflicts with the trademark and the...
Have the high-risk obligations under the AI Act been postponed?
Yes. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, the digital omnibus on AI, has been in effect, and it postpones the high-risk obligations under the AI Act to December 2, 2027, and August 2, 2028. The general...
Can a company send you promotional emails after you make an online purchase?
You buy a ticket online, and right after that, promotional emails start pouring in. Is a company allowed to do that just like that? In a decision dated July 16, 2026 (No. 163/2026), the Dispute Resolution Chamber of the...
Is it permissible for a politician to publicly label an organization ‘far-right’?
Can a politician call an organization ‘far-right’ and ‘close to the Rassemblement National’ during a televised debate, or does doing so constitute a tort that could result in damages? The...
Should you label a deepfake if it's clearly a parody?
When soccer prodigy Lamine Yamal recently won the World Cup with Spain—at the expense of Lionel Messi—an AI parody immediately surfaced: a reversal of the iconic 2007 photo in which Messi is holding the six-month-old baby...
Does the journalistic exception to the GDPR apply to the online publication of criminal convictions?
Therefore, simply posting court rulings online does not make someone a journalist. On July 9, 2026, the Court of Justice ruled in the Legal Newsdesk Sweden case (No. C-199/24) that merely making... available for a fee...
Does a video platform lose its protected status as soon as it signs an advertising deal with a creator?
In principle, a platform like YouTube is not liable for what users upload, as long as its role is limited to merely storing that content. But what if the platform, before entering into a commercial...
Dutch 
English