7. Member States shall ensure that market actors refrain from any activities that may impede the demand for and delivery of energy services or other energy efficiency improvement measures, or hinder the development of markets for energy services or other energy efficiency improvement measures, including foreclosing the market for competitors or abusing dominant positions.

They must be balanced so as not to prevent market opening, create discriminations among EU energy suppliers, reinforce distortions of competition or restrict resale.

They must be balanced so as not to prevent market opening, create discriminations among EU energy suppliers, reinforce distortions of competition or restrict resale.

Article 3 of the proposal for a directive provides that the general principles of intellectual property law ‘must avoid the creation of barriers to legitimate trade’; we believe that injunctions must not be used as a means of removing awkward competitors from the market or to hamper legitimate competition.

This in itself is not objectionable provided that such information does not permit the identification of sales of competitors and provided that such information does not permit interference with the retail activity of dealers or parallel importers.

Whereas the differences in national laws concerning commercial representation substantially affect the conditions of competition and the carrying-on of that activity within the Community and are detrimental both to the protection available to commercial agents vis-à-vis their principals and to the security of commercial transactions; whereas moreover those differences are such as to inhibit substantially the conclusion and operation of commerical representation contracts where principal and commercial agents are established in different Member States;