For quite a long time nothing special has been happening in Polish copyright law. Some court decisions here and there (in all fairness unlikely to be called ground-breaking) and some new legislative initiatives (that will be worthy of presenting if eventually passed). However, yesterday (June 23, 2015) the Polish Constitutional Tribunal issued a decision on…
This case concerned blocking orders pursuant to s97A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). The Court found that there was copyright infringement by both UK users and operators of file-sharing websites, insofar as there was communication of copyright works, the communication was to the public, and the act of communication took place in the UK. This…
The claimants, all members of the Motion Picture Association of America holding copyright in a large number of films and TV programmes, were granted a blocking order preventing the use of Popcorn Time, an open source streaming application which used the BitTorrent protocol to download the claimants’ copyright content. A full summary of this case…
The plaintiff alleged infringement under the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 (CRRA 2000), breach of trademark, breach of contract, breach of moral rights, breach of confidence and interference with economic relations. The court held that under the statutory claim (s37 and S40 of the CRRA 2000) it is incumbent on the plaintiff to sufficiently…
The Court of Appeals held that a European Usenet Service Provider (‘USP’), ‘NSE’, was excluded from liability for infringement of copyright and neighbouring rights, pursuant to the provisions for mere conduit service providers and hosting service providers in Articles 12 to 15 of Directive 2000/31/EC (The E-Commerce Directive) as implemented into Dutch law. In the context of…
This case in the Court of Appeal of ‘s-Hertogenbosch concerned the use of a photograph of a photo model by two rappers in one of their music videos. The video was uploaded to YouTube after which it was disseminated via their own website’s homepage and their YouTube Channel. Although the rappers were authorised to do so by the…
The Supreme Court held that pictures of tryptic paintings, as copyrightable artistic works, cannot be used as decoration of shops and on online catalogues without the authorisation of the owner of the copyright in those paintings. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law
A claim for infringement of copyright and design rights failed. There was no good reason to reject evidence that the fabric in question was created without sight of the claimant’s fabric; the similarities between the designs were not sufficient to infer that there had been subconscious copying. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP…
In this case, the Court of Appeal was required to determine the amount of damages payable when the fact of infringement was ascertained but there was insufficient evidence on the total amount of damages incurred. The court held that the circumstances related to the type, nature and gravity of the infringement, the lost profit, any moral damages…
Another blocking order in the UK, however, this time there was some complexity about the actual acts of infringement. In Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation & Ors v Sky UK Ltd & Ors, the High Court considered the circumstances in which website blocking orders should be granted against websites facilitating the use of a “sophisticated…
