Introduction The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC), part of the English High Court, has ruled that copyright subsists in the character of Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter and that a character can be protected as a literary work under the UK’s closed list of copyright works ([2022] EWHC 1379 IPEC). That copyright was found to have…
Welcome to the second trimester of the 2022 round up of EU copyright law! We started this rubric back in 2021. In this series, we update readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. You…
Use of the author’s quote on a high school Twitter account was educational rather than commercial because it clearly was intended to inspire high school athletes, and the school obtained no profit from its use. In a case in which an author sued a public school district for using a passage from his book on…
In this contribution, we look at the future of content moderation after the recent decision of the Grand Chamber of the CJEU of 26 April 2022 on the validity of Article 17 CDSM with regard to freedom of expression. This decision is a crucial turn for a number of reasons, the main one being that…
The Austrian Supreme Court held that YouTube – as a host service provider – was not responsible for copyright infringements by its users as long as it was not put on notice of the infringements (17. 9. 2021, 4 Ob 132/21x). For monetizing uploaded videos, the uploading user has to confirm that they have read…
An interesting case recently decided by the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) has focused on whether the slogan “500% FIAT” can be protected by copyright (decision No. 8276/2022, published on 14 March 2022). The dispute was started by the author of the slogan against the Italian carmaker FIAT. The author had registered the slogan…
The UK High Court has declared that Ed Sheeran’s mega-hit “Shape of You” does not infringe copyright in Sami Switch’s lesser-known song “Oh Why” ([2022] EWHC 827 (Ch)). The case focuses on whether Ed Sheeran consciously copied Sami Switch’s chorus. Accordingly, this case is a useful example of how a court will: (1) assess the…
The district court’s rejection of the employee’s qualified immunity arguments on summary judgment was nonappealable. The U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans lacked jurisdiction to hear an appeal of a district court’s summary judgment ruling finding that material facts precluded deciding as a matter of law the validity of a qualified immunity defense asserted…
In its landmark 1994 decision Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruled that Campbell’s creation of a rap parody version of a popular Roy Orbison song could be fair use because it transformed the original song by adding something new, with a different purpose, or a new meaning…
Judgment nº208/2021 of Madrid Commercial Court nº16 (December 20th, 2021) Context and facts This case concerns a dispute between the collecting management organisation CEDRO[1] and GOOGLE DISCOVER for non-payment of fair compensation for the limitation established in article 32.2 (now abrogated by the implementation of the CDSM Directive[2]) of the Spanish Copyright Act (SCA) between…
