To ensure you don’t miss out on interesting IP law developments reported on our other IP blogs, we will, on a regular basis, provide you with an overview of the top 3 most-read posts from each of our IP law blogs. Here are the top posts from January, February and March. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright…
The European Parliament has just approved the new text of the copyright directive, which will now go to the Council for a final vote on April 15th, 2019. This legislation not only modifies the copyright framework as set out in the Information Society Directive (Directive 2001/29/EC) but it will also modify the liability regime as…
Introduction: digital exhaustion One of the main limitations to the right of distribution in European copyright law is the principle or rule of exhaustion. This rule, known as the first sale doctrine in US law, means that the right of distribution is exhausted by the first sale or other transfer of ownership of a copy…
Part 1 of this post explained the background to the development of shadow libraries and their growth in recent years. This post will analyse the nature of the works downloaded and discuss the implications of shadow libraries for the future of scholarly publishing. What is being downloaded? Over the 4.5 month period in 2014/15, 760,868…
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools raises possible issues of bias, discrimination and transparency that need to be investigated by (legal) researchers. But AI tools can also support the implementation of legal principles and rules. This is the case with smart disclosure systems (SDSs). The latter refers “to the timely release of complex information…
Introduction Cloud Services are often used for communicating, distributing and reproducing digital content, since IP based devices are nowadays a common means for exploiting such content and the IP connection between client devices and servers is made simpler with the use of virtualized resources in Cloud. We noted in a previous post (see here) that…
In its judgment of 19 December 2018 in Criminal proceedings against Imran Syed (C-572/17) the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rules that the storage of copyright infringing items constitutes infringement of the distribution right if identical items are also held at the actual place of sale and those items are intended to…
Introduction In 2016, Science published a short report on the usage of SciHub, a piratical scholarly journal article distribution service. Set up by Alexandra Elbakyan, a kazakhstani scientist, SciHub allows users to bypass journal publishers’ paywalls, so everyone can have access to journal articles for free. The report, based on a dataset provided by Elbakyan,…
Introduction This post briefly discusses the new Counterfeit & Piracy Watch List published by the European Commission on 7 December 2018 (Watch List). The Watch List represents the EU Commission’s most recent effort to protect the intellectual property rights (IPRs) of European rights holders. Through a “follow the money” enforcement strategy, the Watch List targets…
On 10 January 2019, the Advocate General (AG) Szpunar delivered his opinion in the case Spiegel Online GmbH v Volker Beck (C 516/17). Part I of this blogpost explored the AG’s stance in relation to the degree of latitude left to Member States when implementing copyright exceptions and the ambit of the news reporting exception…
