By Martin Husovec, Tilburg University and Matej Gera, CIPPM, Bournemouth University This a continuation of our recent blogpost: “Slovakia adopts a new Copyright Act: It’s a Mixed Bag – Part I”. In the first part, we discussed the amended threshold for the protection of subject matter, exceptions and limitations and explained changes that have been…
By Martin Husovec, Tilburg University and Matej Gera, CIPPM, Bournemouth University Some will associate the year of 2016 with the year of the Fire Monkey or the monkey selfie. Not Slovak copyright scholars, whose government decided to engage in its own monkey business – an entirely new Copyright Act (Act No. 185/2015). Being the third…
Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with an earlier decision by the Slovak Supreme Court about unauthorised use of a famous Tank Man picture in the Slovak media. The case has now hit the Slovak Constitutional Court, thus providing it with the first ever opportunity to discuss the interface of copyright and freedom…
Is the mere accessibility of a copyright infringing website sufficient to establish jurisdiction in a Member State? The Court of Justice of the European Union says a resounding “yes” in Pez Hejduk C-441/13. The decision does not come as a big surprise, given the earlier (in)famous Pinckney C-170/12 ruling (reported on this blog here) –…
“The activity of the operator of a dedicated meta search engine (…) comes close to the manufacture of a parasitical competing product.” Christmas somewhat overshadowed the publication of a particularly interesting CJEU decision: case C-202/12 (Innoweb), dealing with the legal protection of databases in relation to meta search engines. The judgment was published on 19…
In February this year, the Czech Supreme Court ruled that a mere posting of an embedded link that links to copyright-protected material, must be regarded as a communication to the public and therewith as a direct copyright infringement. The Court was either unaware of pending cases in Luxembourg, or too impatient to wait for the…
“A young photographer, Ladislav Bielik, did what came naturally. He raised his camera and shot back.” Last week, people in Slovakia and Czech republic were commemorating the 45th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of former Czechoslovakia. In August 1968, about 500,000 Soviet troops and most of their Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia, with tanks to halt…
The second season of the popular Slovak TV series “Dr. Ludsky” was enjoined from being distributed and communicated to the public after authors of the film treatment filed for a preliminary injunction. Dr. Ludsky is a “Dr. House-style” Slovak series that became quite popular in the last two years. The series as such is based…
On the first week of January, media and blogs extensively reported about a Slovak ruling of the Regional Court in Bratislava, which denied copyright protection on newspaper articles. In fact, the court assessed only three articles submitted as evidence, and of course, did not deny copyright protection in general. On the other hand, it quite…
