Case Law

Case Law, CJEU, Communication (right of), European Union, Infringement, Liability, Making available (right of), Technological measures

(University of Cyprus)/ /1 Comment

On March 9th, 2021 the CJEU delivered its eagerly awaited decision on the VG Kunst case (C‑392/19). The facts of the case are interesting, since the question of the lawfulness of frame linking and of inline linking was not directly raised. Instead, it appears indirectly in the context of the assessment of licence terms requiring…

Authorship, Case Law, Contract, Ownership, Software, United Kingdom

, (Bristows LLP)/ /1 Comment

Summary The IPEC has held than an employee produced software in the course of his employment, despite his claims he did most of his work in his own time, at home, and on a personal computer. In the decision, Penhallurick v MD5 Limited [2021] EWHC 293 (IPEC), Hacon J suggested that such factors did not…

Case Law, Damages, USA

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US)/ /Leave a comment

By disallowing multiple statutory damages awards under the Copyright Act, the Ninth Circuit could cause future plaintiffs under similar facts to sue each defendant separately. In a suit—in which a jury returned a verdict of $480,000 against five defendants in the textile industry—involving infringement of a single copyrighted fabric design, the U.S. Court of Appeals…

AG Opinion, Case Law, CJEU, Database right

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On 14 January 2021, Advocate General (AG) Szpunar delivered his Opinion in Case C‑762/19, SIA ‘CV-Online Latvia’ v SIA ‘Melons’, a further case relating to the database sui generis right. The application of the sui generis right to the activity of search engines was the main question raised in this case. Specifically, a specialist search…

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Case Law, CDSM Directive, Exceptions and Limitations, Text and Data Mining (TDM), USA

(Macquarie Law School)/ /Leave a comment

Will the text and data mining (TDM) exceptions, introduced in arts 3 and 4 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive) and currently being implemented by the EU Member States, serve its purpose of promoting the development of AI technologies or will they remain (another) set of meaningless black…

Case Law, Enforcement, Germany

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Everybody on the internet needs domain names. This also true for websites which run an illegal business model dedicated to copyright infringements. Such rogue websites are also called structurally copyright infringing websites. The German highest civil court Bundesgerichtshof (“BGH”) [German Federal Supreme Court] has now held that domain registrars have duties of care to disconnect…

Case Law, Infringement, USA

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US)/ /Leave a comment

District court erred in ruling that a copyright infringement suit by a medical certification board against a physician for sending test questions to a test prep company was time-barred. The “discovery rule” in a copyright infringement case means that the three-year statute of limitations begins to run on the date of the discovery of the cause of…

Case Law, Infringement, USA

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US)/ /Leave a comment

An illustrated book titled “Oh, the Places You’ll Boldly Go!” did not make transformative use of Dr. Seuss’s copyrighted pictures and stories, although Lanham Act claims were properly dismissed under the Rogers test. In a closely watched copyright and trademark dispute over a “mash-up” book imitating and combining features of the works of author/illustrator Dr. Seuss and…

Authorship, Case Law, Ownership, United Kingdom

, (Bristows LLP)/ /1 Comment

The relative contribution of a joint author is a factually complicated and difficult matter to assess. The re-trial of Martin and another v Kogan [2021] EWHC 24 (Ch) confirmed this to be the case. We have previously written about this authorship dispute regarding the film Florence Foster Jenkins [here] and [here]. In this post, we…