On May 22 of this year Directive 2001/29/EC was exactly 10 years old – a birthday largely gone unnoticed. The ‘Copyright Directive’ or ‘Information Society Directive’ (for experts: ‘InfoSoc Directive’) marked an important stage in the process of harmonization of copyright and related rights in the European Union. In contrast to earlier directives that dealt…

On the 28 of October the European Commission adopted a Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. The Recommendation follows up on a similar Recommendation from 2006, updating for new developments such as the launch in 2008 of Europeana and the adoption of the Commission’s proposal for a Directive…

UK: ITV Broadcasting Ltd v TV Catchup Ltd High Court of England and Wales (Patents Court), 18 July 2011 Live-streaming: In a case on internet live-streaming retransmission of TV broadcasts and films, the High Court ruled that the introduction in the UK Copyright Act of a general right of communication to the public with respect…

Finland: Finreactor I, Supreme Court (Korkein oikeus), 30 June 2010. Filesharing: The defendants were administrators of the Finreactor BitTorrent file sharing network. The networks’ users could illegally download copyrighted works. The network was built so that the files were not available on the Finreactor’s site but resided on users’ own computers. Finreactor had a tracker…

In a somewhat surprising move, on 12 July 2011 the lower house of the Spanish Parliament urged the Government to abolish the so-called “canon digital” (the private copying levy on digital media) and replace it by a “less arbitrary and indiscriminate system” that provide rightsholders with a “fair and equitable remuneration based on the effective…

On 16 June 2011 the Court of Justice of the European Union gave judgment in Case C-462/09, Stichting de Thuiskopie v. Opus Supplies Deutschland GmbH, Mijndert van der Lee and Hananja van der Lee (case C 462/09), a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden (the Dutch Supreme Court). As in…

The saga of copyright protection of industrial design works continues. Historically, Italian courts had been very reluctant to recognize copyright protection to industrial design works due to a provision (now abrogated) contained in the Copyright Law that clearly excluded copyrightability of creative works whereas the artistic value of the work was not separable from the…

As reported by the Dutch commentator Lucie Guibault in her recent Blogpost the Dutch government (in the person of the secretary of state, Fred Teeven) plans to restrict the private copying limitation. Downloads from “obviously illegal sources” shall be declared unlawful. In Germany such a rule exists already, implemented in the course of the first…

The Advocate General’s Opinion in Case C-145/10, Painer v Standard VerlagsGmbH et al., parts of which have already been discussed in an earlier blog post (here), also deals with the copyrightability of portrait photos. In this case, German and Austrian newspaper publishers had published portrait photos of Natascha Kampusch, and a photo-fit based on one…

By Luke McDongagh, PhD Candidate, QMIPRI The Irish Times has recently reported that the Joyce estate has, after many years of refusal, finally granted the English singer Kate Bush permission to use the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy from James Joyce’s seminal novel Ulysses as the lyrical basis for a song. The soliloquy, spoken at the…