It is an exciting time – the European Union (EU) has started the long-awaited negotiations with Australia on a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). What could creative industries expect in terms of the intellectual property chapter, and copyright law in particular? Should Australia be afraid of the EU requiring an additional layer of copyright protection, as…

The percentage of Internet users in Europe that occasionally download or stream music, films, series, books or games illegally has decreased between 2014 and 2017. The decrease is greatest for music, films and series. Meanwhile, expenditure on legal content has increased since 2014. This follows from the Global Online Piracy Study that the Institute for…

Introduction Since the British government has triggered Art. 50 TEU it can be considered a certainty that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union. What is not clear to date are the exact terms that will shape the future relationship between the two parties – and thus the situation of British stakeholders in the…

Forthcoming in the November 2018 issue of Communications of the ACM, a computing professionals journal, is a column entitled “Legally Speaking: The EU’s Controversial Digital Single Market Directive” by Professor Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley Law School. The editors of Communications of the ACM have given permission for this column to be pre-published for the Kluwer Copyright…

Forthcoming in the November 2018 issue of Communications of the ACM, a computing professionals journal, is a column entitled “Legally Speaking: The EU’s Controversial Digital Single Market Directive” by Professor Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley Law School. The editors of Communications of the ACM have given permission for this column to be pre-published for the Kluwer Copyright…

While awaiting the vote (on 5 July 2018) of the European Parliament on the Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee Proposal on Article 13 of the draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market – commented on previously by Christina Angelopoulus – in this post we will focus on the Proposal agreed on by the European…

Last week, the Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee of the European Parliament voted in favour of Rapporteur MEP Axel Voss’s proposal on Article 13 of the draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The saga surrounding this infamous text is however far from over. A group of MEPs are currently challenging the JURI version…

The debate on Art. 13 Draft DSM Directive has gained speed, after the Commission’s initial 2016 proposal was supplemented by the Council’s proposal of May 25, 2018, and after the European Parliament’s JURI Committee on June 20, 2018 also voted on an own proposal for Art. 13 Draft DSM Directive. The plenary vote is due…

On 4 June 2018, one of the core concepts of copyright – the copyright work – was disputed at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The “cheese battle”, which started in 2015 at the Court of First Instance in Gelderland (the Netherlands) between HEKS’NKAAS (applicant) and ‘Witte Wievenkaas’ (defendant), resulted in a…

Here at the Kluwer Copyright Blog we are thrilled to have had the opportunity to ask Felix Reda MEP a few questions on the controversial Proposal for a Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive). But first, some background. The original proposal was submitted in November 2016 by the Commission. The ordinary…