On March 18, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the denial of Stephen Thaler’s application to register A Recent Entrance to Paradise, a purportedly machine-authored work, holding that the Copyright Act of 1976 “requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human…
Last year we reported on the European AI Office facilitating the drawing-up of the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (the “Code”). The first draft of the Code was published on 14 November 2024. Our article on the first draft of the Code can be found here. This blog post is to report on the updates…
In March 2025 the New Zealand Supreme Court confirmed that copyright is relationship property, to be divided accordingly when a qualifying relationship ends. This decision has significant implications for copyright practice in New Zealand, and jurisdictions with similar regulatory frameworks for IP and family property (like the United Kingdom). Background As recounted by Lyall…
In a decision of 20 February 2025 the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) denied copyright protection as a work of applied art for two sandal designs. The ruling clarifies the scope of protection under German and EU law for works of applied art. According to the BGH, works of applied art enjoy protection if they…
The debate on the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI models is evolving, shifting its focus from whether compensation is due to creators, to determining the structure and specifics of a remuneration system. The discussion seems to be focused on a number of remuneration schemes, three of which deserve special attention. First, an…
The commercial teaching kit use the artist’s works in their entirety and encouraged the students to create their own art based on them. An art center that sold “art kits” for use by children made a fair use of six of an artist’s works that it included in full in its kits because it drew…
The concept of lawfulness in relation to user status or user acts has been gradually established in EU digital copyright law as a condition for the enjoyment of certain copyright exceptions. However, the concept has proliferated inconsistently, lacking a clear normative content and shape. There is variant terminology: “lawful acquirer of a computer program” or…
Introduction It took more than three years after the deadline to implement the CDSM Directive in Poland. The new copyright law, the amended Polish Copyright and Related Rights Act of 1994, entered into force in the early autumn of 2024. Poland is the last country, after Bulgaria, to implement the CDSM Directive. During the five…
Introduction Ever since digital online transactions became ubiquitous from the late 1990s onward, the copyright world has been grappling with metadata problems. Metadata can generally be defined as “data about data”, where for example the musical recording is the central data point, and the song’s title, composer(s), performer(s), etc. are the metadata. Incorrect or missing…
Digitalization has transformed the way in which we obtain access to copyright-protected content and for how long we can preserve access. Traditionally, the purchase of the tangible copy of a work afforded the buyer or every lawful acquirer of the tangible copy the possibility to enjoy the work as long as the physical object incorporating…
