Welcome to the fourth and final trimester of 2021 round up of EU copyright law! We started this rubric in the beginning of 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…

Introduction In a previous post on this Blog, we analysed the EU case law relating to the emerging services of Cloud Service Providers (C-265/16, V-CAST), as well as the impact of the new EU Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM). More specifically, in the case between V-Cast and RTI, the CJEU ruled that…

Parts 1 and 2 of this post (originally published in “Auteurs & Media”) summarising case law of the German Bundesgerichtshof from 2015 to 2019 are available here and here, and part 4 will be published on the blog shortly.   IV. Related rights In addition to rights of the author, German copyright law also recognises…

We are happy to announce that going forward we will be publishing an annual review of the case law of the German Bundesgerichtshof, authored by Jan Bernd Nordemnann (NORDEMANN law firm). In order to bring readers up to date on earlier developments, over the next few days we will be republishing in four parts an…

Although the author worked under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement when he penned the movie, the right to ownership was governed by copyright law and not labor law. The writer of the screenplay for Friday the 13th, the classic summer camp thriller that spawned a generation of equally campy horror films, was entitled to…

De minimis analysis involves the substantiality of the copying, not the use to which the infringing work is put; by definition, wholesale copying of a protected work cannot be de minimis copying. A company that owned a website on which it unknowingly displayed a photographer’s photo without authorization could not assert a de minimis defense…

Heirs of “Game of Life” developer failed to overcome work-for-hire doctrine in bid to terminate developer’s original transfer of rights to Hasbro predecessor. The federal district court in Providence, Rhode Island, correctly determined that heirs of toy developer Bill Markham could not reacquire copyrights to the boardgame “The Game of Life” from Hasbro, Inc., and…

Welcome to the third trimester of 2021 round up of EU copyright law! 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 can read the first and second trimester round…

In July this year, the Federal Court of Australia handed down a decision in Stephen L. Thaler [2021] APO 5, which allowed listing AI system DABUS as an inventor in a patent application. It is interesting to explore what implications this decision could have in the field of copyright. About the DABUS decision The DABUS case refers…