The European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling in joined cases C-682/18 (YouTube) and C-683/18 (Cyando), concerning platform liability for copyright-infringing user uploads under Art. 3 (1) InfoSoc Directive, has been eagerly awaited for a long time. Such a long time – almost a year has passed since the Advocate General opinion (see here) – that…
In February 2019, Tamita Brown, Glen S. Chapman, and Jason T. Chapman (‘plaintiffs’) collectively filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Netflix, Amazon, and Apple (‘defendants’), claiming that the defendants had directly and indirectly infringed their copyright over the song “Fish Sticks n’ Tater Tots” by using it in their documentary titled ‘Burlesque’ (Brown v. Netflix, Inc.)….
An eight-second piece of the song “Fish Sticks n’ Tater Tots” was transformative and reasonably related to the documentary’s purpose of commenting on the resurgence of burlesque dancing. A documentary film’s incorporation of an eight-second excerpt of the children’s song “Fish Sticks n’ Tater Tots” was a noninfringing fair use, the U.S. Court of Appeals…
On 3 June 2021, the CJEU handed down its judgment in CV-Online Latvia v Melons (with Ilešič as a reporting judge), a case involving Melons’ infringement of CV-Online Latvia’s database of job advertisements arguably protected by the sui generis right. The facts of the case are expertly described by Tatiana Synodinou in her comment on the…
In 2019, Artem Stoliarov, a Russian DJ whose stage name is Arty, filed a lawsuit before the US District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that Marshmello’s song ‘Happier’ copied the synthesizer melody from his 2014 remix of OneRepublic’s ‘I Lived’ (OneRepublic is an American pop rock band). Marshmello, an American electronic music…
In Part 1 of this blog post, we introduced the core mechanism of ex-ante protection against the blocking of legal uploads in Germany’s implementation of art. 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD). In Part 2, we examine other elements of the German implementation bill, the “Act on the Copyright…
In a trial to assess the quantum of financial loss in the IPEC, FBT Productions LLC v Let Them Eat Vinyl Limited [2021] EWHC 932 (IPEC), Deputy High Court Judge Ian Karet found the claimant was not entitled to damages for loss of opportunity since that defendant’s wrongdoing did not cause the loss. Damages for…
Navy’s failure to track simultaneous users created copyright infringement liability. Though the Court of Federal Claims correctly found that the U.S. Navy was deemed to have received an implied-in-fact license to copy Bitmanagement Software GmbH’s copyrighted graphics-rendering software onto its computers, the trial court erred by not finding that the Navy breached this license when…
Recently, the Court of Appeal in TuneIn v Warner Music UK Ltd & Anor confirmed the continued application of “retained EU law” in the UK on the thorny issue of communication to the public and clarified the assessment of the “new public” in TuneIn appeal. The UK approach for now remains in line with the…
In May 2019 right after the adoption of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, the Polish Government initiated a legal challenge before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) requesting the annulment of (parts of) Article 17. The Polish challenge claims that the application of the filtering obligations contained in Article…
