42The EU legislature, in providing for such an alternative forum and restricting, in Article 98(2) of Regulation No 207/2009, the territorial jurisdiction attached to that forum, enables the proprietor of the EU trade mark to bring, if he wishes, targeted actions each of which relates to acts of infringement committed within a single Member State. As the Court has stated previously, where a number of infringement actions involving the same parties concern the use of the same sign but do not relate to the same territory, they do not have the same subject matter and are therefore not subject to the rules on lis pendens (see, to that effect, judgment of 19 October 2017, Merck, C‑231/16, EU:C:2017:771, paragraph 42). Accordingly, the courts of the various Member States before which actions are brought in such circumstances cannot deliver ‘contradictory judgments’, within the meaning of recital 17 of Regulation No 207/2009, since the actions that the applicant has brought relate to distinct territories.
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