The document delivery service of ETH Zurich (scanning individual articles and sending them by email to the users) is covered by the exception for private use (Art. 19 CopA), as a person entitled to make copies of a work for private use (Art. 19 al. 1 CopA) may also have them made by libraries and…

The Court rejected B’s application to establish his authorship of a film as a legal fact.  Under Copyright Law no registration or other formalities are required to enjoy copyright protection. It follows that a person owns copyright upon creating a work and there are no special documents certifying the authorship. Therefore a court cannot turn into a…

In a battle between the Zurich Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule (ETH) and three publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Thieme), the Zurich Commercial Court, in its decision of 7 April 2014, prohibited the library from providing a document delivery service (scanning and sending journal articles by email to the users). The Supreme Court reversed this ruling, in its decision…

Competition and collecting societies: a special application of European legal doctrine in Spain. “It seems to utilise the previous methods in a forced manner, even though those methods had led to very different conclusions on a European level.” In a recent decision by the Spanish Market and Competition Commission (CNMC), once again penalising SGAE with…

“With the decision in case C-114/12, the Court is now placing emphasis on the hypotheticals by holding that the mere possibility of an international agreement impacting the EU acquis is enough to rule out Member States’ intervention, making the EU exclusively competent to conclude this type of agreement.” On 4 September 2014, the Court of…

“What has not been clarified though is the aspect of unfair competition.” On 21st of October 2014 the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its order in a preliminary ruling procedure (C-348/13), which was referred to the CJEU by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in May 2013.  As yet, only the…

“What the Court did not consider though, is that the outcome of the application of the 3-step test to the digitisation of each individual work for the purposes of making it available for research and private study purposes may conflict with the absolute prohibition of digitising the entire collection.” Judgment CJEU of 11 September 2014,…

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…