Stijn Debaene

Career

I am a partner in the intellectual property department of Fieldfisher's Brussels office.

For more than 15 years, I have been litigating cases in all areas of intellectual property law (copyrights, trademarks and patents) in a variety of sectors but with a particular focus on the media and telecom industries.

My IP litigation client's team range from small designers like La Fille d'O, over major entertainment production companies like Studio 100 to BEL 20 companies like Telenet or multinationals like Vitra.

For these and other clients my team and I have been involved in several landmark cases like the Telenet / United Video Properties patent litigation case which went up to the Court of Justice of the European Union "ECJ"). (C-57/15).

Besides the IP litigation practice, we have also built a nice sports law practice, which has led us to represent professional football players and cyclists before a wide variety of national and international arbitration panels. We are also active on the transactional front and have, for example, negotiated Marouane Fellaini's transfer to his current Chinese club or TV rights deals with the Premier League.

I have attended four universities in four different languages. I accomplished my Bachelor at the Université de Namur, my Master at the Catholic University of Leuven (including one Erasmus year at the Università degl Studi di Siena in Italy) and my LL.M at Columbia University School of Law.