The issue highlights ongoing project management difficulties with the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) which launched its first two satellites from French Guyana last week.
Galileo International Technology – whose parent company, Travelport is registered in Atlanta, Georgia – operates in the field of air travel reservation and has twice challenged the name before the European Court of Justice against the Commission and lost.
More recently the company has lost another action against a Spanish Galileo subsidiary – Galileo Sistemas y Servicios – in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
Cases under way ‘all across Europe’
Nevertheless there appear to be many ongoing challenges to the trade mark. In relation to the Spanish case, a source with close knowledge of the cases told EurActiv: “This was purely a question relating to the registrability of one trade mark, it is not a question that addresses anything to do with use or any variations of that mark.”
The source said that there remain a number of live challenges to companies affiliated to the Galileo project “all across Europe, there are different parties, different issues against the Galileo trademark.”
The Commission has resisted the challenges on the basis that the rival company operates mainly in the area of computer programmes relating to air transport, rather than navigation satellite systems.
EurActiv understands that the Commission has been advised by those close to the project that it has three options for proceeding: ditching the umbrella name Galileo and renaming the entire Galileo scheme; creating new trade marks for the commercial applications of Galileo; or fighting or negotiating the cases with Galileo International.
EU wants to keep name of famous European
A spokesman for the Commission said that there was no doubt that the preferred option would be to keep the name Galileo for all the activities, but acknowledged that “finding names for the five [commercial] services under a Galileo umbrella programme, is indeed an option under consideration.”
“The Commission is extremely reluctant to renounce the name of one of its most famous European citizens at the behest of a US company,” an EU source said.
If the Commission intends to change the trade marks under which Galileo will trade commercially, this will need to be done well before the commercial applications come on-stream in 2014.
However sources working close to the project said that the issue should be resolved as quickly as possible, in order to create goodwill in any new names.
One source close to the operation of Galileo said that the issue highlighted how intellectual property issues such as trade marks and licences have become more significant as the project developed. The source said that the management of the project had been less commercially focused whilst it was managed from the Commission's transport and energy directorates, but that this had improved markedly since its transfer last year to the enterprise directorate.
“It is now being run much more from an industrial policy angle,” the source added.
The Galileo project was originally intended to be operational in 2008 at a total cost of €3.4 billions. As with most large public projects the date and cost have slipped: to 2014 and an estimated €7 billion respectively.
COMMENTS
instead of wasting resources the Commission should just change the final vowel and rename the project GALILEI which is still the surname or family name of this famous European.
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