In its latest opinion, the European Copyright Society has reviewed the German Federal Court of Justice’s (BGH) referral in the Pelham II (a.k.a. Metall auf Metall) case. Although the beginning of the legal dispute dates back to 1999, a quarter century seemed to be not enough to answer all possible questions surrounding the sampling of a…

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is about to write yet another chapter in the never-ending, or so it seems, ‘Metall auf Metall’ saga. The facts of the case are all too familiar by now: in 2004, German band Kraftwerk took hip hop producer Moses Pelham to court for copyright infringement after…

Setting the Scene Much ink has been spilled on the legal discourse surrounding generative AI (GenAI) and copyright. In this post, the focus is on the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in the context of training GenAI models, where such use could jeopardise the market for those particular expressions (see Sobel). Several copyright lawsuits have…

This is not the first time that readers of the Kluwer Copyright Blog will have read about either the CDSM Directive or the reCreating Europe project. This post enriches the body of work in this area by summarizing the key findings of our two-phase empirical research on end-user flexibilities and end-user license agreements (EULAs) of…

In the context of the reCreating Europe project a recent interdisciplinary report was published on Copyright Content Moderation in the EU. The report addresses the following main research question: how can we map the impact on access to culture in the Digital Single Market (DSM) of content moderation of copyright-protected content on online platforms? This…

The buzz around AI-generated outputs seems to never stop. While the field is rich on exaggerated claims, there are certain domains that have seen a genuine revolution fueled by AI. One such field is journalism. In the past years, sophisticated AI algorithms have become a meaningful assistant in the European news industry. Going beyond mere…

On 15 December 2020, the European Commission submitted a proposal for a Regulation on a Single Market For Digital Services (Digital Services Act, DSA) and amending Directive 2000/31/EC. In November 2021, the Council of the European Union reached agreement on an amended version of this proposal, and on 20 December 2021, the European Parliament’s Committee…

Article 17 has been a (the) leading buzzword of the copyright reforms of the European Union in recent years (at least half a decade already). The transposition deadline has now passed. As of June 6, 2021, however, only a handful of Member States have implemented Directive 2019/790/EU (Copyright in the Digital Single Market; hereinafter CDSMD)….

Part I of this post introduced the recent emergence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), explained their basic characteristics and what they can represent. In this Part II we discuss copyright law aspects of NFTs, with a focus on the EU copyright acquis.   Where Copyright Law meets Blockchain As anticipated by the examples in Part I…

From relative obscurity only a few months back, public awareness of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has risen dramatically. This has come about following their use in connection with the transaction of different types of digital content (including artworks), often for exorbitant amounts. The constant online news stream on NFTs is hard to miss, as illustrated by…