The increasing costs of publication under the Gold Open Access model and “Big Deals”   The European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) has for many years supported the move away from proprietary models of scientific publishing towards Open Access (OA).[1] OA publication of publicly funded scientific research bears the triple promise of…

On December 17, 2021, in a big win for electronic dance music (EDM) artists, the Dutch Supreme Court held that DJs own phonographic rights (neighbouring rights) in their home-produced recordings – not the record labels that commercially release them. The decision comes in a long-running dispute between world-famous Dutch DJ and EDM artist Martin Garrix…

On June 7th, two years after its adoption, the deadline for implementing the DSM Directive finally expired. While academics and stakeholders have been critically dissecting its controversial provisions on platform liability, news aggregation and text & data mining, the Directive’s Chapter 3 (‘Fair remuneration in exploitation contracts of authors and performers’) has gone almost unnoticed,…

Introduction The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on intellectual property (IP) law undoubtedly ranks as one of the most-discussed topics of 2020 among legal academics and practitioners (including on this blog). Following initiatives at WIPO, the EPO and several national IPOs (including the UKIPO and the USPTO), EU institutions have now also become active in…

Art. 2(2) of the DSM Directive defines ‘text and data mining’ as “any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form in order to generate information which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations”. Text and data mining (TDM) generally refers to the computer-based analysis of large bodies…

As the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and ongoing discussions in the EU legislature illustrate, the economic rights granted to right holders under EU copyright law – the rights of reproduction, communication to the public and distribution – have become increasingly unpredictable. While the right of reproduction already covers almost every direct or…

With the growth of the ‘data-driven economy’and the rise of ‘Big Data’ have come calls for the introduction of a novel property right in data. Apparently in response to demands from the German automotive industry, the European Commission has in its 2017 Communication on ‘Building a European data economy’ advanced the idea of creating a…

Good news for copyright aficionados who (like me) rather read their copyright law from hard copies than from screens. After a ten-year wait the second edition of Concise European Copyright Law (a.k.a. “Concise Copyright”) was finally published earlier this year. If you liked the ‘little blue book’ that first came out in 2006, you will…

The European Commission keeps sending us surprises. After December’s Communication on Modernizing Copyright, which contained a mixed bag of copyright goodies, we had expected just about anything but the announcement that followed on March 23rd. The European Commission has launched a public open consultation on ‘the possible extension’ of neighbouring rights to publishers. As we…

Although the actual founding of the Institute for Information Law is shrouded in myth and mystery, in 2014 it will be 25 years ago that IViR was officially established as a research centre at the University of Amsterdam. IViR’s 25th birthday will be celebrated next year in Amsterdam from 2 to 4 July, with a…