This book provides a wide-ranging review of the European rules relating to distribution: exclusive purchase and exclusive supply, exclusive and selective distribution, motor vehicle distribution, franchises, commercial agents.

French Distribution Law

A manufacturer may reserve its contract warranty to goods bought from selected distributors. Where the validity of the selective distribution network is established, the limitation of the manufacturer's warranty to the contract goods purchased from authorized distributors is lawful . This solution enables distributors to fight against “free-riders” who take advantage of their investments in after-sales service without having to bear the costs.

Reserving the manufacturer's warranty to products purchased from an authorized distributor may lead to the foreclosure of national markets however. Thus, a network developer cannot prevent a distributor from ensuring the maintenance of devices purchased in another Member State . A clause which authorizes the reseller to sell software outside the national territory only on condition that the reseller covers all the warranty claims or, if it cannot carry out that maintenance, that it obtains “a customer's written waiver and disclaimer” is unlawful where it is likely to deter purchasers from obtaining supplies from a selected reseller located abroad . By contrast, a manufacturer is not bound to provide its internal warranty to non-authorized resellers who have purchased its products in the parallel network . In effect, where the products do not have the same characteristics and two channels (selective distribution/parallel resale) co-exist, the network developer may reserve international warranty to those that are sold through authorized distributors .

In all events, the reseller who sells the contract goods under conditions such as misleading consumers on the nature of the warranty commits an act of unfair competition . This is the case where it voluntarily omits to inform consumers about the absence of warranty usually attached to the same products marketed within a network  or issues a certificate of warranty on the sale of luxury watches for which it is not approved .

Although the Metro ruling authorizing the limitation of the contractual warranty to products purchased through authorized resellers has never been questioned, the Commission, interpreting in the same way Motor Vehicle Regulations 123/85 and 1474.95 , has endeavored to extend the benefit of the guarantee to all vehicles as at the origin, they had been sold by a member of the network even to a reseller outside the network. In French law, the Court of Cassation  has upheld the same interpretation about an advertisement made by a non-network reseller. It held that, insoafar as the vehicles must have been originally acquired from the manufacturer or an authorized reseller, they were covered by the manufacturer's warranty. The new vertical restraints regulation and Regulation No 461/2010 no longer refer to this matter and therefore the solutions reached by the Commission and the courts no longer have any legal basis.

Cass. com., 18 October 1994, LawLex200200001534JBJ.

Regarding exclusive concession, but the solution may be transposed to selective distribution: CA Paris, 30 June 1994, LawLex200200003247JBJ.

CA Paris, 28 October 1997, LawLex200200002786JBJ.

CA Paris, 16 November 2000, LawLex200200000710JBJ; Competition Council decision No 00-D-72 of 16 January 2001, LawLex200200002704JBJ.

Competition Council decision No 00-D-72 of 16 January 2001, LawLex200200002704JBJ. See, also, CA Paris, 26 June 2001, LawLex200200002337JBJ: a supplier is free to have a selective distribution network to coexist with a parallel network thus allowing consumers to take advantage of diversified offers relating, inter alia, to the granting or not of a manufacturer's guarantee, where no discrimination of an anticompetitive nature exists within those networks.

CA Paris, 17 February 1993, LawLex200200001666JBJ.

CA Toulouse, 30 March 1995, LawLex200200001469JBJ.

CA Paris, 23 January 2019, LawLex201900000108JBJ.

Answer to question 19 of Explanatory Brochure for Regulation No 1475/95.

Cass. com., 13 January 1998, LawLex200200001191JBJ.

223. Manufacturer's warranty.