The Swedish Supreme Court considered under what circumstances, and to what extent, a penalty payment can be imposed on a company that has been prohibited under penalty of a fine from selling an infringing product, where violations to that prohibition have been made by a third party. A full summary of this case has been…
In response to a reference from the Brussels Court of Appeal, the CJEU held that Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29/EC (the Infosoc Directive) must be interpreted as meaning that a broadcasting organisation does not carry out an act of “communication to the public” when it transmits its programme-carrying signals exclusively to signal distributors without those…
The draft law for the implementation in Greece of Directive 2014/26/EU on collective management of copyright and related rights and multi-territorial licensing of rights in musical works for online use in the internal market, which was released for public consultation a few days ago, contains a surprise provision, which has the potential to reverse the…
On November 13th the Dutch Supreme Court provided another chapter in the case of ISPs and blocking of the Pirate Bay (hereafter: TPB). It decided that the Court of Appeal had used an incorrect, namely too broad, criterion to judge the effectiveness of a blocking measure. Furthermore, preliminary questions were referred to the ECJ concerning…
The French Supreme Court (‘Cour de cassation’) has caused a stir in France (15 May 2015, No 13-27391), by quashing a judgment of the Court of Appeal of Paris for breaching Article 10-2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”). The Supreme Court held that before condemning an alleged infringer for copyright infringement, the…
Introduction The SGAE case recently resolved by the Spanish Competition Authority ended in a settlement agreement, as we previously reported . As we indicated in that article, this case did not just examine relations between the collecting society and users regarding the establishment of licensing terms and conditions. The initial analysis also tackled the complex…
The court held that the applicable law is determined by the lex loci protectionis (Schutzlandprinzip), therefore the question of authorship in Switzerland is determined by the Swiss “creator’s principle”, not the British principle of “work for hire“. Where it is claimed that there has been a parallel creation, inspired by elements in the public domain…
When considering whether a collective management organisation had abused its dominant position by imposing unreasonably high licence fees, it was justifiable to compare its fees with the fees in other markets. These markets should be comparable to the Latvian market in order to achieve the correct outcome. As well as having a similar gross domestic…
Introduction 9 July 2015 saw the resolution of the umpteenth case involving Spain’s National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) versus a Spanish collecting society (judgment here). On this occasion, the society was SGAE, responsible for managing music copyright. The proceedings examined a complaint made by various composers regarding the measures that the society had…
By Jeremy Blum and Luke Maunder, Bristows A recent decision in the UK Intellectual Property and Enterprise Court (IPEC) provides some helpful guidance on the application of the ‘user principle’ and, more importantly, on the interplay between damages for flagrant infringement under s.97(2) of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) and damages under…
