The Polish Supreme Court held that the creative (original) nature of a work protected by copyright may manifest itself in the creative, new and simplified combination of known elements e.g. insurance products. The condition of individuality of such a work will be met if it is unique from the statistical point of view, meaning that…
The Centre for International Intellectual Property Studies (CEIPI) has just published a position paper on the proposed reform of copyright exceptions and limitations in the European Digital Single Market (DSM). The European Commission’s planned copyright reform proposes to adapt EU law to the challenges emerging in the Digital Single Market (DSM). This CEIPI Opinion does…
Article 13 of the Proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSMD) and the accompanying Recital 38 are amongst the most controversial parts of the European Commission’s copyright reform package. Several Member States (Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany) have submitted questions seeking clarification on aspects that are…
On 7 September 2017, AG Szpunar delivered his opinion on Case C-265/16, VCAST. The case concerns the question of whether the private copying exception covers the services of an online platform that allows users to store copies of free-to-air TV programmes in private cloud storage spaces. AG Szpunar’s proposed answer was a mixed one: while…
Following an interlocutory question from the French Council of State, in a dispute concerning the legality of the decree of 27 February 2013 on the application of the law of 1 March 2012 on the digitisation of out-of-print books of the 20th century, the Court of Justice of the European Union (Case C-301-15) rightfully stated that…
In a recent UK judgment, Neptune (Europe) Limited v deVOL Kitchens Limited, Neptune was unsuccessful in its claim against a fellow kitchen designer, DeVOL. DeVOL’s ‘Shaker’ kitchen was found not to have infringed the UK unregistered design rights (“UDR”) and a Registered Community Design (RCD) in Neptune’s ‘Chichester’ range. UDR was created to complement copyright…
In a copyright action brought by Ukranian figure skater Oksana Baiul and her company, Oksana Ltd., a federal district court did not err in dismissing her claims, with prejudice, after judgment on the pleadings was granted to defendant NBC Sports, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City has ruled. The dismissal with prejudice…
A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law and the case has been discussed on the Kluwer Copyright Blog here. The CJEU held that Article 2(a) and Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29 preclude national legislation that gives an approved collecting society the right to authorise the digital reproduction and communication to the…
Legal enforcement of open source software license violations, in particular violations of the General Public License (GPL), has been established in Germany for quite some time. Back in 2004, the Regional Court of Munich I granted an injunction confirming copyright infringement on the basis of a violation of the terms of the GPLv2 (judgment of…
Over the course of the last couple of months, we witnessed an outburst of creativity concerning the wording of Art 13 of the Digital Single Market Directive (‘the Directive’). Last week, the Estonian Presidency tabled a compromise proposal (here – thanks to Statewatch) for the meeting of the Working Party on Intellectual Property that takes…
