Legal enforcement of open source software license violations, in particular violations of the General Public License (GPL), has been established in Germany for quite some time. Back in 2004, the Regional Court of Munich I granted an injunction confirming copyright infringement on the basis of a violation of the terms of the GPLv2 (judgment of…

Over the course of the last couple of months, we witnessed an outburst of creativity concerning the wording of Art 13 of the Digital Single Market Directive (‘the Directive’). Last week, the Estonian Presidency tabled a compromise proposal (here – thanks to Statewatch) for the meeting of the Working Party on Intellectual Property that takes…

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 June, July and August. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright…

A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law The Supreme Court held that even in cases where many photographs are involved, the courts must carry out a separate examination of each individual photograph in order to assess their respective originality, if necessary by grouping them by common characteristics. To make…

With the growth of the ‘data-driven economy’and the rise of ‘Big Data’ have come calls for the introduction of a novel property right in data. Apparently in response to demands from the German automotive industry, the European Commission has in its 2017 Communication on ‘Building a European data economy’ advanced the idea of creating a…

A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law. The Estonian Authors’ Society (EAÜ) is a collecting society that administers authors’ economic rights in Estonia. The EAÜ sued a music concert organiser who had not acquired a corresponding licence for public performance of copyright works and had not paid a licence…

In the case Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft der Autoren, Komponisten und Musikverleger registrierte Genossenschaft mbH (AKM) V Zürs.net Betriebs GmbH (C-138/16, Judgment of 16 March 2017) the CJEU was called upon to decide once again on the seminal concept of communication to the public. The right of communication to the public, which has proved to be…

On 21 May 2015, the IP specialist chamber of the High Court of First Instance of Paris handed down one of its worst rulings in copyright law: in breach of the most basic EU and French copyright law rules, it refused copyright protection to a famous photograph of Jimi Hendrix (reproduced above), taken by Gered…

  On the 5 July 2017, the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam organized its ‘Blockchain and Copyright Symposium’. For a brief introduction to this symposium and the topic, see our previous post. The symposium was divided into two parts. In the first part, following an introduction by IViR senior researcher…

Back in December last year, we reported –on this blog– on the legal vacuum left in the wake of the Spanish Supreme Court’s judgment declaring the system for financing private copying null and void. As you will recall, from 2012 to 2016 fair compensation for private copying was financed in Spain from the General State…