The European Commission has referred six Member States (Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Portugal) to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for failure to notify complete transposition measures on copyright in the Digital Single Market (Directive (EU) 2019/790) (CDSM Directive). This follows its decision last year to send reasoned opinions to 13…

This post is the second instalment of an analysis of the ‘very short extracts’ (VSE) carve-out to the press publishers’ right set forth in Article 15 of the CDSM Directive. The first part examined the legal nature of the VSE rule, concluding that it ought to be qualified not as an ‘exception’, but as a…

On Monday, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture held a public hearing on the implementation of Article 17 of the Copyright Directive. As part of this meeting, the Ministry outlined its proposal for a user rights-preserving “blocking procedure” that substantially deviates from all other implementation proposals that we have seen so far. The procedure…

The Finnish market court (Markkinaoikeus) has sided with the producers of the sci-fi feature film ‘Iron Sky‘ in a copyright case (MAO:302/18) concerning rights in that movie. The market court dismissed the claims by animators and visual effects (VFX) technicians who asserted that the producers of the feature film had used the claimants’ copyright-protected works…

Finland: Finreactor I, Supreme Court (Korkein oikeus), 30 June 2010. Filesharing: The defendants were administrators of the Finreactor BitTorrent file sharing network. The networks’ users could illegally download copyrighted works. The network was built so that the files were not available on the Finreactor’s site but resided on users’ own computers. Finreactor had a tracker…