The Latvian Supreme Court has recently ruled on the determination of pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages for copyright infringement in a case where the copyright works had been used for informatory purposes. Case No. SKC-[B]/2016 was adjudicated in a closed hearing, as a result of which the number of the case file and the date of…

The court of appeals held that as there was no evidence that the Defendants had gained any profit from a public display of sculptures, they were not liable to pay royalties in respect of the exhibition.  However, the defendants were ordered to discontinue sales of products bearing pictures of the copyright sculptures as this activity…

The Supreme Court held that it is a matter of fact, not law, whether a work created from fragments of another work is a derivative work (according to Article 2 of the Copyright Act) or another kind of non-independently created work. Therefore this type of issue cannot be debated in an action for determining the…

The bizarre saga known as Garcia v. Google has finally come to end with an eleven judge en banc decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Garcia v. Google, Inc., 786 F.3d 733 (9th Cir. 2015)). That holding came in response to a remarkable, if not astonishing holding by a…

This case in the Court of Appeal of ‘s-Hertogenbosch concerned the use of a photograph of a photo model by two rappers in one of their music videos. The video was uploaded to YouTube after which it was disseminated via their own website’s homepage and their YouTube Channel. Although the rappers were authorised to do so by the…

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with an earlier decision by the Slovak Supreme Court about unauthorised use of a famous Tank Man picture in the Slovak media. The case has now hit the Slovak Constitutional Court, thus providing it with the first ever opportunity to discuss the interface of copyright and freedom…

A brief outline of the copyright protection granted for architectural designs In Article 2/1,  the Berne Convention counts architectural works, together with plans, sketches and three-dimensional works relative to architecture, as copyrightable subject matter. Turkish law treats architectural creations in two different categories: as “literary works” and “works of fine art”. Accordingly, under Law No…

In 1993, the Belgian chapter of International Literary and Artistic Association (ALAI) organised an international conference in Antwerp on the moral rights of the author. This year, more than twenty years later, the international copyright community will gather in Brussels to discuss the Moral rights in the 21st century.  The central theme of this conference…

“According to Art. 13 of the German Copyright Act (“CA”) the author has the right to be identified as the author of the work. He may determine whether the work shall bear a designation of authorship and which designation is to be used.” The District Court of Cologne (Landgericht Köln) apparently never sleeps. After its…

“A young photographer, Ladislav Bielik, did what came naturally. He raised his camera and shot back.” Last week, people in Slovakia and Czech republic were commemorating the 45th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of  former Czechoslovakia. In August 1968, about 500,000 Soviet troops and most of their Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia, with tanks to halt…