With the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) restarting its activities after the vacation break, we look back to one of the late-summer judgement, standing out for its technical, yet impactful character. In Case C-426/21, the CJEU looked into the complicated relationship between copyright law and online television services. The focus of the case…

The belated Portuguese transposition of the CDSM Directive was finally published in the Portuguese Official Journal (Diário da República) on the 19th of June 2023. The approved Decree-Law 47/2023 to a large extent corresponds to a legislative project (Project 52/XV), which, in turn, was a variation of a previous project (Project 114/XIV) that failed due…

Introduction By introducing the press publishers’ right in art. 15 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM), the EU legislator wanted to aid press publishers in licensing and enforcing their rights in press publications. The hope was that once press publishers are recognized as rightsholders in the EU legislation, their legal…

Article 17 has been a (the) leading buzzword of the copyright reforms of the European Union in recent years (at least half a decade already). The transposition deadline has now passed. As of June 6, 2021, however, only a handful of Member States have implemented Directive 2019/790/EU (Copyright in the Digital Single Market; hereinafter CDSMD)….

In its long-awaited Opinion on an action brought by Poland to annul certain parts of Article 17 of the Directive on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (CDSM Directive), Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard Øe demarcates the borders of permitted filtering of users’ uploads. If followed by the Court of Justice of the…

On 4 June 202, the European Commission published its guidance on Article 17 of Directive 790/2019 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM Directive). The guidance drew attention mainly because the Commission shifted from a position that rejected ex-ante blocking of content to a permissive take towards ex-ante blocking beyond manifestly illegal content (see…

Despite the turbulent times Italian politics have experienced in the past year – which led to a change of government in the midst of the pandemic emergency – the ball of the transposition of the CDSM Directive (CDSMD) into Italian law is still rolling. As of today, it is difficult to predict whether the deadline…

Our daily life is studded with hints unveiling how the Internet is becoming a society within our society. From the terms and conditions we subscribe to in order to use it, to consolidated practices in the online world, the Internet mostly functions according to its own rules, which either abide by or clash with legal…

On 9 July 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in Case C-264/19 Constantin Film Verleih v YouTube and Google Inc. Providing clarification on the scope of the copyright holder’s right to information, the CJEU decided that the notion of “address”, as set in Directive 2004/48/EC (Enforcement Directive), does…

Summary On 30 April 2020, the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) delivered its ruling in the ‘Metall auf Metall’ saga. It decided that the appeals court had erred in finding that reproduction of a two-second sample infringed the reproduction right of a phonogram producer before the coming into force of Directive 2001/29/EC (InfoSoc Directive)….