“Every day citizens here in the Netherlands and across the EU break the law just to do something commonplace. And who can blame them when those laws are so ill-adapted.” Speech Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, delivered at the opening of Information Influx, the 25th anniversary conference of the Institute for Information Law…
“A clear intention to solve some of the most disturbing problems in Spanish IP.” On February 14th, the Spanish Government approved a bill to amend the law of intellectual property (TRLPI). The bill is currently in its parliamentary proceedings. It is a “patchwork” reform bill dealing with very different topics, some more necessary than others, and…
“The Court added a cherry on top of the transparency cake.” It is no secret that secrecy in the TTIP negotiations has been bothering several sectors of civil society (apologies, but the links to back this up were too many to insert here). Just last week, the Court of Justice has issued a decision in…
“A take-down notice which generically refers to the titles of the infringing videos, without specifically indicating their URLs, is not sufficient to determine the “actual knowledge” of the hosting provider.” On May 5, 2014, the Distric Court of Turin has given a preliminary ruling on the proper content of the take-down notices in copyright infringement…
“This would mean that the ruling will not leave end-users substantially worse-off, despite the qualification of their acts as infringing. However, that is a difficult argument to make.” In its judgment of 10 April 2014 in Case C-435/12 ACI Adam BV and Others the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that the…
“The study concludes that under their domestic copyright laws none of the current EU Member States offer protection to sports events as such. A handful of countries, however, afford some special form of protection to the specific interests of sports organizers.” A study on sports organizers’ rights was launched by the European Commission in January…
In France, search engines using thumbnails are likely to infringe on copyright. On 8 April 2014, a French Senator proposed a Bill to establish compulsory collective management for the reproduction of photographs and images by search engine services. Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of photographs and images, used by search engines such as Google Images in…
The KluwerCopyrightBlog is part of Kluwer’s IP Kluwer IP Law portfolio. Whereas the blog serves as a platform where scholars and practioners can share their informed opinions on specific aspects of IP law and jurisprudence, the related Kluwer Copyright Cases Database aims to accumulate important case law in the field of copyright in one database….
Important ruling by Dutch Supreme Court on cable retransmission, film copyright and collective management of rights Guest blog by Prof. Dr D.J.G. Visser, Institute for Private Law, Leiden University “This could well mean that several Dutch collecting societies, in particular those representing actors, screenwriters and directors (Norma, Lira and Vevam) can no longer claim remuneration…
“This indicates the main danger of the ruling, that of fragmentation. This was foreseen by the Austrian referring court, which suggested that guidelines assessing the proportionality of blocking measures be laid down by the CJEU – that would have been welcome indeed! That absence is certainly the biggest deficiency of the ruling.” Last Thursday, the…
