This morning, in Case C‑523/10 Wintersteiger AG v Products 4U Sondermaschinenbau GmbH, on a reference from Austria, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on where a trade mark infringement action might be brought in Austria by an Austrian company, which held trade marks both in Austria and Germany, against a German company which had reserved one of its trade marks as a search term for the search engine's ".de" service, considering both countries spoke the same language and that search results from ".de" would be received by Austrian internet users who used that trade mark as a search term. The Court ruled as follows: 

"Article 5(3) of Council Regulation (EC) No 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters must be interpreted as meaning that an action relating to infringement of a trade mark registered in a Member State because of the use, by an advertiser, of a keyword identical to that trade mark on a search engine website operating under a country-specific top-level domain of another Member State may be brought before either the courts of the Member State in which the trade mark is registered or the courts of the Member State of the place of establishment of the advertiser".