In Happy Camper Productions Ltd v British Broadcasting Corporation, the claimant sought an interim injunction in the context of alleged infringement of copyright in a script. The claimant failed in its application for multiple reasons as we explore. The claimant company was the purported owner of the copyright in a script for a pilot episode…
Part 1 of this post discussed the legislative history and significance of the CJEU referral in Tom Kabinet. This part will illustrate content and implications of the three classificatory dichotomies, explain why EU copyright law needs digital exhaustion, and propose interpretative solutions for the CJEU to help with this, leveraging the occasion offered by the…
The Court concluded that the Copyright Tribunal does not have jurisdiction under section 126 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to set the terms of licences of foreign copyrights; but that it nevertheless has the power in some circumstances to make an order in respect of the whole of a licence which covers…
The Court held that a greeting card designer was the sole copyright owner of the rights in a number of greeting cards but had validly assigned the copyright to the claimant. The defendants were jointly liable for infringement of copyright in two of the claimant’s cards. Case date: 06 June 2018 Case number: [2018] EWHC…
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 January, February and March. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright…
A defendant need not obtain a favorable judgment on the merits in order to be a “prevailing party” under the fee-shifting provisions of the Copyright Act and Lanham Act. Case date: 25 March 2019 Case number: No. 17-4046 Court: United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit A full summary of this case has been published on…
On Valentine’s Day, the Higher Regional Court of Vienna (docket no 4 R 119/18a) issued a judgment on a complaint by the Austrian broadcasting company Puls 4 against YouTube, predating the much-discussed Article 17 (formerly known as Article 13) of the Copyright Directive. The petition requested aimed to prevent YouTube from making available videos containing…
Introduction: digital exhaustion One of the main limitations to the right of distribution in European copyright law is the principle or rule of exhaustion. This rule, known as the first sale doctrine in US law, means that the right of distribution is exhausted by the first sale or other transfer of ownership of a copy…
In its judgment of 19 December 2018 in Criminal proceedings against Imran Syed (C-572/17) the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rules that the storage of copyright infringing items constitutes infringement of the distribution right if identical items are also held at the actual place of sale and those items are intended to…
In January 2018, Google filed a petition to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review two adverse rulings by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the Oracle Am. Inc. v. Google Inc. case. The first was the Federal Circuit’s 2014 decision overturning a district court ruling that several thousand declarations that Google…
