As we enter a new year, we would like to take this opportunity to pass on our best wishes for 2025 to all of our readers, as well as reflect on developments in copyright over the past year. Last year was another busy one in the copyright world, with an increasing focus on the relationship…

Introduction The 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive is a complex legislative text that raises several questions of legal interpretation. Increasingly, these questions are making their way to national courts. A recent example is the Dutch case ruled upon by the Amsterdam District Court (“the court”) on 30 October 2024. The plaintiffs…

Now that 2024 is behind us, it’s time to report on the fourth trimester. Here is our final roundup of that AI-rich year. This post marks the fourth year of running this series on our blog. In it, we provide updates on key developments in EU copyright law from October to December 2024, covering everything…

Introduction The interaction between the AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) and the exceptions for text and data mining (TDM) in the CDSM Directive is one of the most important topics in EU copyright law today. One particularly controversial point of intersection is the AI Act’s attempt, through recital 106, to give extraterritorial effect to its copyright-related…

Content creation on YouTube reportedly reached a new peak during the second half of 2023, meaning that the platform experienced a surge in infringing uploads on the one hand, and copyright actions by its users on the other. The platform’s automatic detection technologies have once more been put to the test, while compliance with the…

On 26 September 2024, the Belgian Constitutional Court referred a highly topical issue of fair remuneration of authors and performers on online streaming platforms to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). The reference, which is poised to result in one of the most significant CJEU judgments in the copyright law field, concerns the…

As reported in earlier posts on this blog, in a 2022 study, I examined the national implementations in the 11 Member States that had at that time transposed Article 15 (the press publishers’ right) and Article 17 (the special copyright liability regime for “online content-sharing services providers” (OCSSPs)) of the EU’s Copyright in the Digital…

The Digital Services Act (DSA) transparency database, while proving to be rather useless for misinformation or hate speech researchers, is very enlightening on copyright moderation.  Platform governance researchers have long suspected that YouTube is the most heavily moderated platform on copyright issues, and we now have concrete proof of this.  YouTube, to date, according to…

The discussion on creators’ remuneration is gaining momentum. The main reason: the growing popularity of generative AI and its potential to substitute human creative labour. With the current income streams in danger, new ways of remunerating creators are put forward. The most intuitive proposition is that for providers of generative AI, big tech, to remunerate…

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. It is hard to remember how divisive and controversial the Directive was during its creation. The Directive’s most controversial provision – Article 17 – which brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets and…