The Conseil d’Etat, the French administrative Supreme Court, handed down an important ruling on 15 November 2022 which annuls Order no. 2021-580 of 12 May 2021 (‘2021 Order’) of the French Government that implements articles 2(6) and 17 to 23 of the EU Directive 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market…

We are happy to inform you that the latest issue of the journal is now available and includes the following contributions: Tanguy Van Overstraeten & Richard Cumbley, Brace! Brace! Brace! The Wave of Incoming CJEU Decisions This article considers the large number of pending decisions on data protection matters in front of the Court of…

In April 2021, the Austrian Supreme Court referred two questions of principle to the CJEU concerning the activity of a satellite TV package provider (Austrian Supreme Court, 4Ob195/20k). On 22 September 2022, the Advocate General provided his opinion on the case. The questions referred can be summarised as follows: Is Article 1(2)(b) of the Satellite…

Although the company’s description of each individual skill may not have been copyrightable, its selection and arrangement of those skills merited protection. A federal district court properly found that a table of workplace skills developed for use in a career-readiness assessment program was protectable under the Copyright Act because it reflected creativity in the selection…

The principle of ‘de minimis’ is a common law principle that has been derived from the Latin maxim ‘De Mimimis Non-Curat Lex’, which essentially means that the law does not care for, nor take notice of, very small or trifling matters, and therefore does not require judicial scrutiny. This principle has not been statutorily recognized…

It seems inevitable that UK copyright law will change at some stage. It increasingly appears that judges are waiting for a case which requires the inconsistencies between EU and UK copyright law to be addressed. Unfortunately, the recent decision in WaterRower v Liking [2022] EWHC 2084 (IPEC) was not that case, despite many reporting in…

In Safarov v. Azerbaijan (Appl. no. 885/12) the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) finds that the defendant State violated Article 1 of Protocol No.1 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). In its judgment of 1 September 2022, the Court determines that Azerbaijan failed to enforce copyright…

The photographer’s mere showing of removal of embedded copyright management information (CMI) in hotel photographs is insufficient to meet the scienter requirement. The federal appeals court in Atlanta, Georgia has refused to reinstate a case brought by a photographer claiming a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against a hotel intermediary that provided…

The digital codes were created for functional purposes and were put together under purely mechanical rules. The digital codes sent by a pyrotechnics control system were not entitled to protection under the Copyright Act because they were no more than “an inevitable system dictated by the logic” of the setup, the U.S. Court of Appeals…