The long-awaited and much anticipated judgment of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (“IPEC”) in Waterrower (UK) Limited v Liking Limited (t/a TOPIOM) [2024] EWHC 2086 (“WaterRower”) was finally handed down last month. IP practitioners and the wider design community have been eagerly awaiting the decision as it was expected to be the first UK decision…
Just seven weeks after the release of the AG’s Opinion the Kwantum v. Vitra case was decided by the European Court. For Dutch background and early criticism, see my earlier blog. The main question asked to the Court was whether a Member State may unilaterally apply the Berne Convention’s rule of material reciprocity (Article 2(7)…
Code as a literary work Following lengthy discussion in the 1970s and 1980s, by 1991 in the EU and 1994 at the WTO level, the legal status of computer programs was a settled matter: software was to be treated under copyright as a literary work. Source code and object code are protected by copyright. As…
The Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with Kluwer Law International, publisher of the Information Law Series, has launched an online archive of older book volumes published in the series. The Information Law Series, which was established in 1991, is the world’s first and foremost academic book series in…
Generative AI (GenAI) is promising to revolutionise higher education. Whether it concerns legal scholars using ChatGPT to write their essays, computer science majors relying on GitHub Copilot to generate programming code, or art students turning to Midjourney to create visual artistry: the relevant AI tools to assist with educational assignments are readily available online. The…
The effect of rapid development of generative AI on copyright law continues to challenge the lawmakers and courts. Whilst the UK High Court is yet to reach its decision on liability for copyright infringement in the AI training data in Getty Images v Stability AI, the Chinese case of Ultraman became the first to recognise…
The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 (REULA) came into force on 1 January 2024 and has some significant implications for IP law. Much IP law in the UK is derived from EU law – both implemented EU law and case law decided in view of EU law. REULA could impact all…
The case recently brought against OpenAI by the New York Times is the latest in a series of legal actions involving AI in the United States, and mirrored in other countries –notably, the UK. In order to train their technologies, should AI companies be allowed to use works under copyright protection without consent? The lawsuits…
On November 27, 2023, the Beijing Internet Court (BIC) ruled in an infringement lawsuit (Li v. Liu) that an AI-generated image is copyrightable and that a person who prompted the AI-generated image is entitled to the right of authorship under Chinese Copyright Law (see our bilingual version, and the later-released official translation). Plaintiff generated an…
The ongoing Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution has machine learning models at its core. Contrary to classic computer programs written by developers, many of these models rely on vast artificial neural networks trained in giant amounts of data. In general, they use what is called a transformer architecture. No one individually writes or encodes these models;…
