In a judgment issued on 10 February 2011, the Court of Justice confirmed the General Court's ruling that CD-Contact Data, a distributor of Nintendo video games and consoles, had participated in a plan conceived by the Nintendo group to combat parallel trade of the products between Member States. In Consten and Grundig, the ECJ established the general principle that an agreement violates Article 101 TFEU when it grants absolute territorial protection to exclusive distributors by preventing exports of products by the distributor to other Member States or imports of these products from other Member States (Cases 56 and 58/64 [1966] ECR 299). In respect of exclusive distribution, passive sales must always be allowed. Otherwise, all competition facing the exclusive distributor would be eliminated, and intra-brand competition of the products in turn would be severely restricted. Agreements between a supplier and its distributor(s) that obstruct parallel imports are generally considered as very serious infringements of EU competition law, and subject to heavy fines. In such cases, while the supplier of the products is frequently found to play a leading role in the control and monitoring of the parallel trade, the European Commission will nonetheless also look closely at the participation of distributors party to the arrangement. In the past, the Commission has fined distributors that joined a plan to obstruct parallel imports. At times, distributors, in particular the smaller and legally less-sophisticated ones, may be put in a difficult situation. On the one hand, the prospect of a lucrative business will—rightly—make them eager to become a member of a renowned manufacturer's distribution system. On the other hand, they will, typically in the beginning, not be very familiar with the way the manufacturer conducts its business. There is a risk that by adhering to the distribution network, these distributors are inadvertently led into a pre-existing anticompetitive plan of which they were not aware. Of course, a distributor cannot be considered to be party to an anticompetitive agreement if there exists no ‘concurrence of wills’ between the parties. A unilateral policy adopted by a manufacturer, with an anticompetitive goal, must at least be tacitly accepted by the distributor so as to give rise to an agreement (see e.g. Ford v Commission [1985] ECR 2725). However, the ECJ's judgment in Activision Blizzard Germany GmbH reveals that the requisite standard of proof as regards the existence of a concurrence of wills between the supplier and its distributors is quite low.