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 court of appeals reverses the district court for the second time in a case that has been pending since 2014. A Vietnamese company that makes accessible within the United States a website and a downloadable app that enable the exchange of unlicensed music files can be sued in a California federal court, the U.S….
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…
Three dissenters would have dismissed the case as improvidently granted because the petitioner appeared to address different issues in its brief from its petition for review. An inaccuracy in a copyright registration application that results from a mistake—whether of fact or of law; that is, lack of factual or legal knowledge of the inaccuracy on…
A defamation claim, too, was precluded by the Communications Decency Act. A federal district court in Boston correctly found that the manager of a neighborhood forum could not expose himself to defamation and copyright infringement claims by merely migrating the forum from one web platform to another, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First…
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…
