1. Article 12(1) of Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the internal market ('Directive on electronic commerce'), read in conjunction with Article 2(a) of that directive and with Article 1(2) of Directive 98/34/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 June 1998 laying down a procedure for the provision of information in the field of technical standards and regulations and of rules on information society services, as amended by Directive 98/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 July 1998, must be interpreted as meaning that a service such as that at issue in the main proceedings, provided by a communication network operator and consisting in making that network available to the general public free of charge constitutes an 'information society service' within the meaning of Article 12(1) of Directive 2000/31 where the activity is performed by the service provider in question for the purposes of advertising the goods sold or services supplied by that service provider.

4. Article 12(1) of Directive 2000/31, read in conjunction with Article 2(b) of that directive, must be interpreted as meaning that there are no conditions, other than the one mentioned in that provision, to which a service provider supplying access to a communication network is subject.

Inasmuch as the provisions of Articles 2(1) and 3(2) of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, interpreted in the light of Article 2(1) of the Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, signed in Paris on 20 March 1883, last revised at Stockholm on 14 July 1967 and amended on 28 September 1979, and of Article 41(1) and (2) of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which constitutes Annex 1C to the Agreement establishing the World Trade Organisation (WTO) signed at Marrakesh on 15 April 1994 and approved by Council Decision 94/800/EC of 22 December 1994 concerning the conclusion on behalf of the European Community, as regards matters within its competence, of the agreements reached in the Uruguay Round multilateral negotiations (1986-1994), are not applicable to an invalidation procedure such as that at issue in the main proceedings, those provisions do not preclude that, in such judicial proceedings, the court:

- is not bound by the claims and other statements made by the parties and is entitled to order of its own motion the production of any evidence that it may deem necessary;

- is not bound by an administrative decision made in relation to an application for invalidation or by the findings of fact in that decision, and

- is not entitled to re-examine evidence which was already submitted in connection with a previous application for invalidation.