Welcome to the second trimester of the 2023 round up of EU copyright law! In this series, every three months we update you on what has happened in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. You can read the previous round-ups…

Summary In the case of Wright & Ors v BTC Core & Ors [2023] EWHC 222 the High Court was faced with a technical copyright question about whether literary copyright can subsist in the file format used for the Bitcoin System (the “Bitcoin File Format”).  Justice Mellor concluded that copyright could not subsist in the…

The belated Portuguese transposition of the CDSM Directive was finally published in the Portuguese Official Journal (Diário da República) on the 19th of June 2023. The approved Decree-Law 47/2023 to a large extent corresponds to a legislative project (Project 52/XV), which, in turn, was a variation of a previous project (Project 114/XIV) that failed due…

Part I of this blog introduced the first of three ambiguities NFT purchasers may face. In this part II we discuss two additional aspects, with a focus on UK copyright law and the EU copyright acquis.   The First Sale Doctrine in the Metaverse The first sale doctrine, also referred to as the ‘principle of…

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are altering society’s notion of digital ‘ownership’ and redefining the common perspective on distribution of original works to consumers by introducing scarcity to the digital realm. Although frequently misconstrued, this technology represents an exceptional advancement that can yield enormous revenue streams for both creators and consumers by altering the digital representation of…

On 20 April 2023, the Italian Civil Court of first instance of Florence (Tribunale civile di Firenze) issued a decision that held unlawful the reproduction by lenticular technique of the image of Michelangelo’s David and its juxtaposition with the image of a male model on the cover of GQ magazine. The reproduction was not authorized…

My university, like so many others, is offering prompt engineering lessons to both students and faculty. The same is true at high schools around the world from what I can see. Cool professors have already modified their exams to ask students to write a prompt that could be submitted to a Large Language Model (LLM). …

On 20 April 2023 in the joined cases Blue Air ( C-775/21) and  SNTFC (C-826/21) the CJEU pronounced once again on the infringement of the right of communication to the public, making a further contribution to the already rich case law in this field. This time the questions related to the existence (or not) of…