"This far-reaching judgement will not only have significant implications for Van Cleef & Arpels but also have a profound impact on the whole luxury goods industry in France. In fact, this decision will have a lasting effect on any industry that employs designers in France for years to come. The court has  .. also clarified that French intellectual property law is now to some extent sightly more consistent with the laws of many other countries which follow the "works for hire" principle in copyright law.

Clarity and certainty in judgments, especially from the Court of Appeals, is always helpful to lawyers and industry [in the context of certainty, this blogger notes Asim Singh's guest post on the IPKat last year, here, on the extent to which French courts are now prepared to regard their decisions as binding precedents]. In this case, it also promotes an effective application of the rule of law.

This judgment is undoubtedly a good news for the luxury industry : it demonstrates that the Court of Appeals in Paris has perfectly understood the economic reality of the creation process in practice on a daily basis in many luxury goods and artisanal companies, which is based on the collective work of a team and not on purely individual effort. ...   

This particular case saw Mr Thierry Berthelot, the ex-designer caught in a ferocious battle with his ex-employer the well known luxury jewellery Maison, Van Cleef & Arpels. Needless to say the case has been closely followed by many luxury goods companies very nervous to ensure that they too can legitimately own and use the creative work of their own employees.

In a nutshell, the Court of Appeal explicitly reasserted the notion of collective works. Under French law, an employee does not automatically assign his or her rights to his or her employer as a result of his or her employment contract (a mechanism known as a “work made for hire” in many other jurisdictions). Instead, French law provides for “collective works” where intellectual property rights on works created “collectively” belong - from their conception - to the person (often the employer) who takes on the initiative of the creation, supervises the creative process and discloses the creation to the public. The unique legal aspect of a "collective work" is that no assignment is needed from the various contributors of the work to the employer. The employer, under French law, is automatically recognised by operation of law to be the original creator of the work.

In this particular case, ... Berthelot, was claiming that his creative process had been performed independently of any instructions or supervision from his employer. Conversely, Van Cleef & Arpels argued and justified that drawings created by Mr. Berthelot were mere contributions to the overall global creative process. This process, as a whole, gave birth to the final jewellery pieces. The Court of Appeals was clearly more convinced by the economic reality painstakingly described by Van Cleef & Arpels. Consequently, the judges recognised the collective nature of the works and fully rejected Mr. Berthelot’s claims.

In fact, the judges were so peeved that they decided to to go one step further and duly ordered Mr. Berthelot to pay Van Cleef & Arpels 10,000 euros in damages for having unduly withheld his drawings throughout the proceedings in order to exert what the Court deemed an unacceptable form of pressure on his employer. The Court of Appeals fined Berthelot ... for an abuse of legal process for having taken physical possession of the design drawings himself (in effect "taking the law into his own hands"). The Court decreed in unequivocal terms that it: "was not necessary ... to retain the disputed drawings to enforce the intellectual property rights he claimed" and that he should be ordered to pay 10,000 euros to Van Cleef & Arpels for this "malicious behaviour”. These are indeed strong words from the bench....

Mr Stanislas de Quercize, CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels, stated: 

"We are delighted with the Court of Appeals in Paris's judgement. It has brought much needed clarity for all of us in the luxury goods in industry in France. Certainty is always crucial for business but, in this case , the lack of clarity caused consternation for many years in all artisanal and creative businesses in France. We applaud the judges for the crystal clear decision to promote certainty in business""