seised shall of its own motion stay its proceedings until such time as the jurisdiction of the court frst seised is established.” Pursuant to Article 30 of recast Brussels: “(1) Where related actions are pending in the courts of diferent Member States, any court other than the court frst seised may stay its proceedings. (2) Where the action in the court frst seised is pending at frst instance, any other court may also, on the application of one of the parties, decline jurisdiction if the court frst seised has jurisdiction over the actions in question and its law permits the consolidation thereof. (3) For the purposes of this Article, actions are deemed to be related where they are so closely connected that it is expedient to hear and determine them together to avoid the risk of irreconcilable judgments resulting from separate proceedings.” The Court considered that the Irish and English proceedings were not related and that they might never become related; this was due to the fact that the competition defence had not yet been pleaded by OTB in the Irish claim, and since it had applied to strike out those proceedings for want of prosecution, it might well never reach the point of fling any defence to them. The English proceedings will therefore proceed. As indicated, they raise interesting questions of competition law and of whether or not screenscraping is a business practice which ought to be tolerated by the courts.
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