Source: EURLEX
Language: en
Format: md

[JURE SUMMARY](#SM)

## JURE SUMMARY

The plaintiff airline sued both defendants, a Swiss company operating a flight search and booking website, and an English company providing technical services to the first defendant, in the High Court (IE), claiming that their "screen scraping" activities breached the plaintiff's terms and conditions, infringed its intellectual property rights, and were a conversion and trespass on its goods. The English defendant sought to dismiss the proceedings, claiming that the Irish courts had no jurisdiction under Article 23 Brussels I, because Clause 7 of the Terms of Use on the plaintiff's website stated that the English courts had jurisdiction. The Plaintiff argued that as the English defendant disputed the very existence of a contract, there could be no consensus with regard to jurisdiction, as required by Article 23.
The High Court finds for the English defendant. It refers to the ECJ's decision in Benincasa (C-269/95), that a validly constructed jurisdiction clause remains valid despite either party seeking a declaration that the contract containing the clause is void. It also refers to the ECJ's decision in Castelletti (C-157/97) that national courts should be able to decide issues of jurisdiction without having to consider the substance of the case. The High Court decides that allowing the English defendant to rely on the jurisdiction clause under Article 23 while denying the existence of the agreement would do less damage to the jurisdictional regime of Brussels I than allowing the plaintiff to deny the jurisdiction clause, which it formulated, while simultaneously trying to rely on the agreement. Accordingly, it holds that the English defendant, while denying the contract's existence, may rely on the jurisdiction clause contained in it, should it be found to exist.

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