The federal district court in Indianapolis, Indiana, did not abuse its discretion by imposing monetary sanctions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 and 28 U.S.C. § 1927 against an attorney who had represented a company accused of publishing an unauthorized copy of photographer Richard Bell’s photograph of the Indianapolis skyline, the U.S. Court of…
Website blocking injunction cases are complicated in Sweden because the Copyright Act requires contributory liability of the ISP, or in the case of interim injunctions – probable cause, for an injunction to be issued. While the reduced evidentiary burden for interim injunctions does not completely absolve a court from scrutinising the evidence, the legal context…
Josef K. was minding his own business when one morning, even though he knew he had done nothing wrong, he was arrested. This was the beginning of his trial. In his masterpiece entitled The Trial, Franz Kafka tells, among many things, the story of a man trying to interact with a preposterous system of justice….
The Copyright Act’s registration requirement was a non-jurisdictional element of a copyright infringement claim; therefore, a lawsuit brought by online legal research provider Fastcase, Inc., against a competitor to resolve a dispute over the publication of regulations for the State of Georgia should not have been dismissed on the ground that the district court lacked…
The relation between freedom of expression and copyright in the EU is one of imprecision and uncertainty. In Funke Medien (Case C-469/17) the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) asks whether fundamental rights should permit the unauthorized use of military reports in the absence of an applicable copyright exception. In his Opinion, Advocate General (AG) Szpunar…
On remand in a dispute between three academic publishers and Georgia State University about the university’s practice of distributing to students digital excerpts of copyrighted works without paying the publishers, a federal district court misinterpreted the mandate of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta and misapplied the defense of fair use when it granted…
The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has vacated in part a district court’s judgment after a jury trial in favor of the defendants and remanded for a new trial in a copyright infringement suit alleging that Led Zeppelin and members of the band copied the classic rock hit “Stairway to Heaven” from the…
The right of distribution is the least controversial of the three exclusive rights contained in the Information Society Directive (InfoSoc Directive). Yet, every now and then the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is asked to re-examine its scope. With far less interpretative imagination compared with the right of communication to the public,…
The novel “The Light Between Oceans” and a major motion picture based on it did not infringe a complaining author’s copyright in an unproduced screenplay, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City has decided. The Second Circuit affirmed a district court’s determination that, as a matter of law, the novel and film were…
The Patent and Market Court of Appeal upheld the first instance Court’s judgment, confirming that a motorboat could be protected by copyright as a work of applied art, and that this copyright had been infringed by the defendant. The Court also confirmed that as a starting point copyright always belongs to the physical creator and…
