Copyright policy strategies at the EU level have been criticized by many, mainly academics. Critiques include, but are not limited to, the fact that copyright legislation tends to favour more the intermediaries and less the individual creator; or that the interests of users have been lost somewhere along the way. However, a couple of recent…
On 6 September 2011, General Advocate Verica Trstenjak released her Opinion on case C-277/10 (the original German version of the Opinion is available here, other language versions here). The case deals a.o. with the controversial cessio legis provision of the Austrian Urheberrechtsgesetz (Copyright Act – UrhG). According to this provision included in Art. 38(1) UrhG,…
There are many interesting ways one may become a co-author of a copyright work, but in one of its recent decisions the Polish Supreme Court seems to have added a new and quite interesting option. You can namely become a co-author if you delete a few sentences from a scientific article, sentences you believe are…
In its groundbreaking judgment of 4 October 2011 the Court of Justice of the European Union has essentially legalized the import, sale and use of foreign satellite television decoder cards. The judgment, which was given in two joined (originally British) cases, concerned decoder cards that provide access to encrypted satellite transmissions from Greece of British…
This sentence summarizes quite well the decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal of 26 September 2011 which it is abstracted from. The Belgian Anti-piracy Federation filed a cease and desist action against Telenet and Belgacom, two Belgian ISPs, in order to make them block The Pirate Bay’s websites in their respective networks. In first…
In this post, I would like to come back to an interesting decision of the Belgian Cour de Cassation of 7 October 2010, which confirmed that a cease and desist action could be successfully sought against a copyright licensee. As usual, the Supreme Court’s decision is quite concise and does not extensively detail the facts….
In the presence of Michel Barnier, European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed yesterday between European libraries, publishers, authors, and their collecting societies. The MoU comprises a set of key principles that will give European libraries and similar cultural institutions the possibility to digitize and make available…
On 30 June 2011, the Lisbon Court of Appeals has issued its decision in case 323/07.8TVLSB.L1-2 (unfortunately there is no English translation of this). The facts of the case are as follows: a company wanted to hire an artist to create a sculpture, and for that purpose it received a few proposals from different artists….
As highlighted in a previous post by one of my fellow Kluwer Copyright bloggers, and others, a proposal by the European Commission for a directive on an extension of the term of protection for fixations of performances and for phonograms to 70 years after the recording (from current 50 years) has recently been brought back…
Court of Appeal The Hague, 28 June 2011, Stichting Leenrecht v. VOB Lending rights. Plaintiff, the Dutch Association for Lending Rights, argues that an extended loan of library books should be considered a new loan and that therefore public lending rights are due. The Court of Appeal The Hague disagrees and concludes by referring to…
