Belgium, Case Law, CJEU, Collective management, European Union, Legislative process, Remuneration (equitable), Reproduction (right of)

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Case C‑572/13, HP v. Reprobel, 12 November 2015 By Philippe Laurent and Céline Wulleman, Marx Van Ranst Vermeersch & Partners As we know, Member States may adopt exceptions to the reproduction right of authors in the cases and under the conditions listed in Article 5 of Directive 2001/29. Some of those exceptions may be transposed…

Belgium, Case Law, European Union, Exceptions and Limitations, Infringement, Jurisdiction

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Judgment CJEU, 3 September 2014, Deckmyn and Vrijheidsfonds (C-201/13). Request for a preliminary ruling from the Hof van Beroep te Brussel (Belgium). Belgian copyright law provides that “once a work has been lawfully published, its author may not prohibit caricature, parody and pastiche, observing fair practices”. This provision, which existed before the adoption of the…

Case Law, Distribution (right of), Enforcement, European Union, Exhaustion, Infringement, Jurisdiction

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“The test in case of sale could therefore be reduced to the following simple question: would there have been an infringement if the seller had been established in the Member State where the buyer resides.” On 6 February 2014, the Court of Justice of the EU issued a decision in the Blomqvist v Rolex SA…

Belgium, Digital Single Market, Enforcement, Infringement, Making available (right of)

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“No need to wait for the ECJ, the Court replied.” In Belgium, besides being a tort from a civil law perspective, a copyright infringement can also be a criminal offence, on the condition that it is done “with malicious or fraudulent intent”. When copyright infringements are committed by unknown perpetrators (which is quite common on…

Belgium, Case Law, Originality

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On 26 January 2012, the Belgian Supreme Court decided to quash an appeal decision deeming that “when requiring that a work must show the stamp of the author’s personality in order to benefit from copyright protection, the judges of appeal do not validate their decision in law”. According to the Supreme Court, a literary or…

Case Law, Infringement, Liability, Remedies, Technological measures

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The CJEU’s ruling in the Scarlet v. SABAM case (C 70/10) is still fresh in our memories: court injunctions to install global and preventative filtering systems with a view to preventing copyright infringements are precluded. SABAM asked again for the same measures in the framework of the SABAM v. Netlog litigation. Again, the Belgian court…

Belgium, Case Law, Enforcement, Exceptions and Limitations, Infringement, Liability, Making available (right of), Remedies, Technological measures

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This sentence summarizes quite well the decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal of 26 September 2011 which it is abstracted from. The Belgian Anti-piracy Federation filed a cease and desist action against Telenet and Belgacom, two Belgian ISPs, in order to make them block The Pirate Bay’s websites in their respective networks. In first…

Belgium, Case Law, Enforcement, Infringement, Remedies

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In this post, I would like to come back to an interesting decision of the Belgian Cour de Cassation of 7 October 2010, which confirmed that a cease and desist action could be successfully sought against a copyright licensee. As usual, the Supreme Court’s decision is quite concise and does not extensively detail the facts….

Belgium, Case Law, Collective management, Exceptions and Limitations, Legislative process, Remuneration (equitable)

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On 19 November 1992, the European Council adopted the Directive 92/100/EEC on rental right and lending right and on certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property (now replaced by Directive 2006/115/EC), which provides an exclusive right to authorize or prohibit the rental and lending of originals and copies of copyrighted works….

Belgium, Case Law, Collective management, Ownership

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BELGIUM – In a case of SABAM (the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers) versus a counterfeits dealer, the Belgian Supreme Courts finds that in litigations against copyright infringers, collecting societies can prove the existence of management contracts pertaining to some works by solely producing the official repertoire listing that they mandatorily have to…