By now everyone in the world must have heard of Sweden, especially European copyright lawyers. This post concerns two recent preliminary rulings from the CJEU, both at the request of Swedish courts. As both involved the communication to the public right, and both led the CJEU to pronounce the infrequently heard incantation that Article 3…

On Tuesday, November 10, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU or Court) heard case C-401/19. This case is a request by the Polish government to annul the filtering obligation contained in Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive on the grounds that it will lead to censorship…

The first part of this blogpost analysed the main theoretical foundations of the AG’s Opinion in the VG Bild-Kunst case (C‑392/19). The second part focuses on the application of this theoretical background to frame links and inline (automatic) links. As will be shown, the AG has proposed a methodological model of distinction between hyperlinks on…

On September 10, 2020 the Advocate General (AG) Maciej Szpunar delivered his Opinion on the case of VG Bild-Kunst v Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitzanother (C‑392/19), a further case concerning the legality of linking. The assessment of linking from an EU copyright law perspective appears to be a labyrinthine legal exercise, since, following the seminal Svensson (C‑466/12)…

On 9 July 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in Case C-264/19 Constantin Film Verleih v YouTube and Google Inc. Providing clarification on the scope of the copyright holder’s right to information, the CJEU decided that the notion of “address”, as set in Directive 2004/48/EC (Enforcement Directive), does…

The Court of Justice of the EU has handed down its judgment (18 December 2019, Case C-666/18) following the request for a preliminary ruling from the Paris Court of Appeal (IT Development v Free Mobile, 16 October 2018, No 17/02679; see our post here). In answer to the question: does the breach of a software…

Summary On 30 April 2020, the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) delivered its ruling in the ‘Metall auf Metall’ saga. It decided that the appeals court had erred in finding that reproduction of a two-second sample infringed the reproduction right of a phonogram producer before the coming into force of Directive 2001/29/EC (InfoSoc Directive)….

Part 2 of this publication will be published on the Kluwer Copyright Blog shortly.  “… [T]his Directive shall leave intact and shall in no way affect existing rules laid down in the directives currently in force in this area, in particular Directives … 2001/29/EC.”. Art. 1(2) of the EU Directive on copyright and related rights…