Although the company’s description of each individual skill may not have been copyrightable, its selection and arrangement of those skills merited protection. A federal district court properly found that a table of workplace skills developed for use in a career-readiness assessment program was protectable under the Copyright Act because it reflected creativity in the selection…

    COMMUNIA and Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte co-hosted the Filtered Futures conference on 19 September 2022 to discuss fundamental rights constraints of upload filters after the CJEU ruling on Article 17 of the copyright directive. This blog post is the author’s contribution to the conference’s first session “Fragmentation or Harmonisation? The impact of the Judgement…

The principle of ‘de minimis’ is a common law principle that has been derived from the Latin maxim ‘De Mimimis Non-Curat Lex’, which essentially means that the law does not care for, nor take notice of, very small or trifling matters, and therefore does not require judicial scrutiny. This principle has not been statutorily recognized…

In Safarov v. Azerbaijan (Appl. no. 885/12) the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) finds that the defendant State violated Article 1 of Protocol No.1 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). In its judgment of 1 September 2022, the Court determines that Azerbaijan failed to enforce copyright…

The photographer’s mere showing of removal of embedded copyright management information (CMI) in hotel photographs is insufficient to meet the scienter requirement. The federal appeals court in Atlanta, Georgia has refused to reinstate a case brought by a photographer claiming a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against a hotel intermediary that provided…

Three dissenters would have dismissed the case as improvidently granted because the petitioner appeared to address different issues in its brief from its petition for review. An inaccuracy in a copyright registration application that results from a mistake—whether of fact or of law; that is, lack of factual or legal knowledge of the inaccuracy on…

A defamation claim, too, was precluded by the Communications Decency Act. A federal district court in Boston correctly found that the manager of a neighborhood forum could not expose himself to defamation and copyright infringement claims by merely migrating the forum from one web platform to another, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First…

Introduction The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC), part of the English High Court, has ruled that copyright subsists in the character of Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter and that a character can be protected as a literary work under the UK’s closed list of copyright works ([2022] EWHC 1379 IPEC). That copyright was found to have…

Use of the author’s quote on a high school Twitter account was educational rather than commercial because it clearly was intended to inspire high school athletes, and the school obtained no profit from its use. In a case in which an author sued a public school district for using a passage from his book on…

Users are increasingly prolonging the lifespan and value of a video game past its initial release date through user-generated content (UGC). The little-understood phenomenon of ‘watching other people play games’ is now a commonplace fact of life online. This phenomenon is responsible for creating game influencers, and those game influencers have also in turn created…