UK: Lucasfilm Ltd & Ors v Ainsworth & Anor, Supreme Court, 27 july 2011. Helmets and harmours created for the characters of the Imperial Stormtrooper in the film Star Wars are not “sculptures”, and therefore are not copyrightable subject matter within the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Nevertheless, a claim for infringement of a…
UK: CSC Media Group Ltd v. Video Performance Ltd, Court of Appeal Civil Division, 27 May 2011. Collective management: The Court of Appeal reversed the High Court’s judgement and reinstated the decision of the Copyright Tribunal in respect of the royalty rate payable by CSC Media Group to Video Performance Limited (VPL) for the use…
Finland: Finreactor I, Supreme Court (Korkein oikeus), 30 June 2010. Filesharing: The defendants were administrators of the Finreactor BitTorrent file sharing network. The networks’ users could illegally download copyrighted works. The network was built so that the files were not available on the Finreactor’s site but resided on users’ own computers. Finreactor had a tracker…
On 19 November 1992, the European Council adopted the Directive 92/100/EEC on rental right and lending right and on certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property (now replaced by Directive 2006/115/EC), which provides an exclusive right to authorize or prohibit the rental and lending of originals and copies of copyrighted works….
One of the recent judgements of the Polish Supreme Court provides a good opportunity to review the basic rules applying to copyright contracts in Poland. The Polish copyright law treats copyright contracts in a rather strict and formal way. It specifically states that both assignment and license contracts only cover the co-called fields of exploitation…
The question, whether software licences for computer programs that were purchased in an intangible form (via download from the sellers’ server) can be resold by the first acquirer and used by the second buyer without consent of the right holder, has to be interpreted in light of the computer program directive 2009/24/EG. A full summary…
BELGIUM – In a case of SABAM (the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers) versus a counterfeits dealer, the Belgian Supreme Courts finds that in litigations against copyright infringers, collecting societies can prove the existence of management contracts pertaining to some works by solely producing the official repertoire listing that they mandatorily have to…
DENMARK – An end user of the Direct Connect file sharing network was found liable for copyright infringements. However, the Supreme Court did not agree with the right holders (respondents) that the extent of the infringements was sufficiently documented and overturned the evidence (a list of files) provided by right holders. Also, the Supreme Court…
On 3 May 2011, the Paris Court of Appeal dismissed the claims of copyright infringement brought by the Syndicat National de l’Edition Phonographique (SNEP- trade association of the French recording industry) against Google. Since 2008, the search engine is proposing a service, Google Suggest, which guesses and suggests a list of keywords in real time…
The commented decision may at first glance appear to be of limited importance only, but after closer examination it contains two interesting points of more general significance. The basic facts are the following: the plaintiff, a collecting society ZAIKS, brought a claim against two companies demanding payment for selling copies of the film “Rejs” (“Cruise”),…
