On the 16 July 2020, the Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard Øe delivered his much-awaited opinion on the case of Peterson v YouTube (joined cases C-682/18 and 683/18), referred to the CJEU by the German Federal Court of Justice. Having explicitly precluded the consideration of provisions of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive…
As we enter a new year, we would like to take this opportunity to pass on our best wishes for 2021 to all of our readers, as well as reflect on developments in copyright over the past year. Despite its challenges, last year was another busy one in the copyright world, with ongoing European copyright…
Rotary turntable control system’s technical drawings were not copyrightable, but underlying software source code could be, depending on full development of factual record. Whether the software source code for a rotary turntable control system was copyrightable raised a question of fact that required full development of a factual record, the U.S. Court of Appeals for…
To ensure you don’t miss out on interesting IP law developments reported on our other IP blogs, we will, on a regular basis, provide you with an overview of the top 3 most-read posts from each of our IP law blogs. Here are the top posts from September, October and November. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright…
By now everyone in the world must have heard of Sweden, especially European copyright lawyers. This post concerns two recent preliminary rulings from the CJEU, both at the request of Swedish courts. As both involved the communication to the public right, and both led the CJEU to pronounce the infrequently heard incantation that Article 3…
Substantial similarity was lacking because the TV show used reported facts in combination with tone, dialogue, and themes that were different from the book. Scenes in the Netflix drama Narcos did not infringe the copyright of Virginia Vallejo, who wrote a memoir about her relationship with Pablo Escobar, because historical facts are not copyrightable, and the plot,…
Appellate court declines to reopen infringement judgment for a case that was not open on direct review. In a copyright infringement case brought by Christ Center of Divine Philosophy, Inc. for infringement of religious books and sound recordings, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver has refused to reopen a judgment awarding $80,000 for willful…
The reproduction of an author’s articles in a newspaper’s online archive was not protected from copyright infringement claims by Section 108(a) of the Copyright Act because this archive was not a “library” or “archive” within the meaning of this section. The author of two articles whose copyright infringement claims against a newspaper over the electronic…
As I posted previously on this blog (here), French press publishers’ unions and the news agency Agence France Presse (‘AFP’) filed a successful request for an interim injunction against Google before the French Competition Authority, in their battle to obtain remuneration for online uses of their publications (Decision 20-MC-01 of 9 April 2020). Google had been manoeuvring…
Because the copyright owner had held the book out as nonfiction, the “asserted truths” doctrine precluded the owner from later claiming copyright protection for facts contained in it. The members of the pop music quartet The Four Seasons and the producers of the hit musical “Jersey Boys” were entitled to post-verdict judgment as a matter…
