From relative obscurity only a few months back, public awareness of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has risen dramatically. This has come about following their use in connection with the transaction of different types of digital content (including artworks), often for exorbitant amounts. The constant online news stream on NFTs is hard to miss, as illustrated by…
The decade-long titanic battle between Oracle and Google over whether copyright law forbids unlicensed reimplementations of parts of the Java Application Program Interface (API) in a smartphone platform is finally over. In a blockbuster opinion for a 6-2 majority for the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer decisively supported Google’s fair use defense. The biggest…
Finding that the government edicts doctrine covers legislative works, Court holds that Georgia’s annotations are inherently public domain material because they are authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its official duties. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia…
By disallowing multiple statutory damages awards under the Copyright Act, the Ninth Circuit could cause future plaintiffs under similar facts to sue each defendant separately. In a suit—in which a jury returned a verdict of $480,000 against five defendants in the textile industry—involving infringement of a single copyrighted fabric design, the U.S. Court of Appeals…
Will the text and data mining (TDM) exceptions, introduced in arts 3 and 4 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive) and currently being implemented by the EU Member States, serve its purpose of promoting the development of AI technologies or will they remain (another) set of meaningless black…
In a judgment of 7 October 2020, the French Supreme Court upheld the judgment of the Court of Appeal of Paris of 13 April 2018 that ruled that Knoll’s ‘Tulip’ chair is not protected by copyright in France. Under the reciprocity rule set out in Article 2(7) of the Berne Convention on works of applied…
District court erred in ruling that a copyright infringement suit by a medical certification board against a physician for sending test questions to a test prep company was time-barred. The “discovery rule” in a copyright infringement case means that the three-year statute of limitations begins to run on the date of the discovery of the cause of…
An illustrated book titled “Oh, the Places You’ll Boldly Go!” did not make transformative use of Dr. Seuss’s copyrighted pictures and stories, although Lanham Act claims were properly dismissed under the Rogers test. In a closely watched copyright and trademark dispute over a “mash-up” book imitating and combining features of the works of author/illustrator Dr. Seuss and…
Rotary turntable control system’s technical drawings were not copyrightable, but underlying software source code could be, depending on full development of factual record. Whether the software source code for a rotary turntable control system was copyrightable raised a question of fact that required full development of a factual record, the U.S. Court of Appeals for…
Substantial similarity was lacking because the TV show used reported facts in combination with tone, dialogue, and themes that were different from the book. Scenes in the Netflix drama Narcos did not infringe the copyright of Virginia Vallejo, who wrote a memoir about her relationship with Pablo Escobar, because historical facts are not copyrightable, and the plot,…
