Introduction AGCOM is the Italian independent and convergent regulatory authority, established in 1997 by Law no. 249/1997 as the national media regulatory body. On 16th October 2018, AGCOM approved the deliberation no. 490/18/CONS (available here) which introduces some modifications and integrations to the Regulation on copyright enforcement in electronic communications networks (“AGCOM Regulation” or simply…

In law, perhaps one of the most famous aphorisms is “I know it when I see it”, which Justice Potter Stewart used to describe his threshold test for obscenity (in Jacobellis v. Ohio,  378 U.S. 184 (1964)). The CJEU, in case C‑310/17, delivered a decision on copyright which in a way confirms this aphorism and…

The 1976 Copyright Act did not preempt applications for attorney fees filed by two auction houses following a determination that the California Resale Royalties Act (CRRA)—a statute that grants visual artists a right to receive 5% of the proceeds on any resale of their artwork under specified circumstances—was expressly preempted by the 1976 Act with…

On 13 November 2018, the CJEU clarified the scope of EU copyright law by excluding works of taste from copyright protection. This marks the end of a three-year long dispute, which arose in 2015 between two cheese producers and was based on the idea that the taste of a food product is copyright protected. In…

The federal district court in Indianapolis, Indiana, did not abuse its discretion by imposing monetary sanctions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 and 28 U.S.C. § 1927 against an attorney who had represented a company accused of publishing an unauthorized copy of photographer Richard Bell’s photograph of the Indianapolis skyline, the U.S. Court of…

Website blocking injunction cases are complicated in Sweden because the Copyright Act requires contributory liability of the ISP, or in the case of interim injunctions – probable cause, for an injunction to be issued. While the reduced evidentiary burden for interim injunctions does not completely absolve a court from scrutinising the evidence, the legal context…

Since 1 April 2018, the Portability Regulation has prohibited geo-blocking of online content within the European Union under certain requirements. The regulation guarantees the unrestricted access to (paid) subscribed online content of all European citizens, regardless of where they are present in EU territory. The presence must be “temporary”. Providers of fee-based online content are…

Josef K. was minding his own business when one morning, even though he knew he had done nothing wrong, he was arrested. This was the beginning of his trial. In his masterpiece entitled The Trial, Franz Kafka tells, among many things, the story of a man trying to interact with a preposterous system of justice….

This article will be forthcoming in the March 2019 issue of Communications of the ACM, a computing professionals journal. The editors of Communications of the ACM have given permission for it to be pre-published for the Kluwer Copyright Blog.         Should European press publishers be granted a new intellectual property (IP) right…