The CJEU’s interpretative work on copyright law issues launched in 2015 with the decision of 15 January in the case of Ryanair Ltd v PR Aviation BV (Case C‑30/14). The Ryanair ruling is the latest stone added to the complex edifice of legal protection of databases in Europe. PR Aviation operates a website which allows…
The first Danish court decision on blocking an infringing website selling replica products was issued on December 11, 2014. It was the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court that issued the ruling, which orders Danish Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to the online store, Interior Addict. Interior Addict is a website which illegally…
Article L.321-1 paragraph 2 of the French Intellectual Property Code (‘IPC’) provides that collecting societies are entitled to take legal action to defend the rights for which they are responsible under their articles of association (by-laws). Collecting societies may therefore take legal action to defend their repertoires and those of foreign collecting societies that they…
The document delivery service of ETH Zurich (scanning individual articles and sending them by email to the users) is covered by the exception for private use (Art. 19 CopA), as a person entitled to make copies of a work for private use (Art. 19 al. 1 CopA) may also have them made by libraries and…
The Court rejected B’s application to establish his authorship of a film as a legal fact. Under Copyright Law no registration or other formalities are required to enjoy copyright protection. It follows that a person owns copyright upon creating a work and there are no special documents certifying the authorship. Therefore a court cannot turn into a…
In a battle between the Zurich Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule (ETH) and three publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Thieme), the Zurich Commercial Court, in its decision of 7 April 2014, prohibited the library from providing a document delivery service (scanning and sending journal articles by email to the users). The Supreme Court reversed this ruling, in its decision…
Competition and collecting societies: a special application of European legal doctrine in Spain. “It seems to utilise the previous methods in a forced manner, even though those methods had led to very different conclusions on a European level.” In a recent decision by the Spanish Market and Competition Commission (CNMC), once again penalising SGAE with…
The KluwerCopyrightBlog is part of Kluwer’s IP Law portfolio. Whereas the blog serves as a platform where scholars and practioners can share their informed opinions on specific aspects of IP law and jurisprudence, the related Kluwer Copyright Cases Database aims to accumulate important case law (new and older) in the field of copyright in one…
“With the decision in case C-114/12, the Court is now placing emphasis on the hypotheticals by holding that the mere possibility of an international agreement impacting the EU acquis is enough to rule out Member States’ intervention, making the EU exclusively competent to conclude this type of agreement.” On 4 September 2014, the Court of…
“What has not been clarified though is the aspect of unfair competition.” On 21st of October 2014 the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its order in a preliminary ruling procedure (C-348/13), which was referred to the CJEU by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in May 2013. As yet, only the…
