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…
The decade-long titanic battle between Oracle and Google over whether copyright law forbids unlicensed reimplementations of parts of the Java Application Program Interface (API) in a smartphone platform is finally over. In a blockbuster opinion for a 6-2 majority for the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer decisively supported Google’s fair use defense. The biggest…
Finding that the government edicts doctrine covers legislative works, Court holds that Georgia’s annotations are inherently public domain material because they are authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its official duties. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia…
In this new series we will be updating readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This will include Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. The end of 2020 Since this is the first issue of our round up, we have also…
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 December, January and February. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright…
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…
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…
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…
