In a letter dated 29 March 2019, the President of the CSPLA (‘Conseil supérieur de la propriété littéraire et artistique’), an independent body in charge of advising the French Minister of Culture on copyright law, has appointed three public institutions to submit a report on the use of recognition tools for copyright-protected content on online…
The Polish government has filed a complaint against the new DSM Directive, and more specifically against its art. 17. While it will be a long time until the CJ EU issues a decision, the complaint makes it likely that the battle for the rules on intermediary liability is not over; it has just been moved…
This is the first post of a series on the new Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market. On 17 May 2019 the official version of the new Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market was published in the Official Journal of the…
In December, we set out our views on what would happen to copyright in the UK following Brexit – see here. This blog is intended to provide an update in light of more recent events. On 15 January 2019, the House of Commons voted to reject the draft Withdrawal Agreement. The Withdrawal Agreement had provided…
Back in 2016, the CJEU examined the question of whether backup copies of software could be resold, following the exhaustion of the right of distribution pursuant to the judgment in C-128/11 UsedSoft. In C-166/15 Ranks (Microsoft), the Court ruled that, although the initial acquirer of software can resell that copy and his licence, he cannot…
Using newer forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including General Adversarial Networks (GANs), AI machines are increasingly good at emulating humans and laying siege to what has been a strictly human outpost: intellectual creativity. AI machines have composed polyphonic baroque music bearing the “style” of J.S. Bach. “Robot reporters” routinely write news bulletins and sports reports,…
EU copyright reform is upon is. Once again, the Member States will need to develop their own implementations of a new piece of European copyright law. This time, the task is far from easy. Due to political turbulence in the legislative process, the resulting text of the Directive is extremely complex. Because of this, there…
On 2 May 2019, Advocate General Szpunar delivered his opinion in Case C-683/17, Cofemel – Sociedade de Vestuário SA v. G-Star Raw CV (not yet available in English). The case concerned designs for t-shirts and jeans made by G-Star Raw. In essence, the question posed by the Portuguese Supreme Court is whether Member States have…
Part 1 of this post discussed the legislative history and significance of the CJEU referral in Tom Kabinet. This part will illustrate content and implications of the three classificatory dichotomies, explain why EU copyright law needs digital exhaustion, and propose interpretative solutions for the CJEU to help with this, leveraging the occasion offered by the…
After years of contradictory decisions and obiter dicta, on April 2, 2019 the CJEU held the first hearing in Tom Kabinet (C-263/18), a Dutch referral that promises to solve once and for good the question of admissibility of digital exhaustion under Art. 4(2) InfoSoc. Against the legislative silence, Tom Kabinet puts the Court at a…
