The Italian Antitrust authority (AGCM) has launched an investigation to assess whether the conduct of META towards SIAE, the largest Italian copyright collecting society, is unlawful due to abuse of economic dependence (for a previous post on the copyright dimension of the META v. SIAE dispute, see here). Let’s start with the background. META and…
From January 2020 to July 2022, the H2020 project reCreating Europe and its teams at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa) and the University of Szeged performed an unprecedented mapping of EU and Member States’ sources on copyright flexibilities, focusing both on public regulatory sources (statutes, court decisions, governmental policies and practices) and on private ordering tools,…
This is a two-part post summarising the authors’ findings from the report on Copyright Infringement in the Video Game Industry, which was prepared by the authors for the World Intellectual Property Organization. It focusses on the state of the art of the video game industry and the role of IP, in particular copyright, throughout the…
The removal of SIAE’s repertoire from Meta’s social networks “This song is currently unavailable” or “The audio track in your reel is no longer available. You can replace the audio track once, which will also remove any original audio in your reel”. These are some of the messages appearing on Instagram or Facebook to users…
This blog is a continuation of an earlier Kluwer post ‘Getting paid to play? Copyright, contract, and the rewards for UGC’ and is based on the findings of the You Can Play project. When does a ‘creative work’ become ‘user generated content’ (UGC)? My recent research on video game UGC policies suggests the thin…
Welcome to the first trimester of the 2023 round up of EU copyright law! In this edition, we report on an AG Opinion that came out late in 2022 and update you on what has happened in the first trimester of 2023 in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court…
Data portability rights are hot in EU legislation. Although these rights are doomed to create conflicts with copyright, neighbouring rights and the sui generis right in databases, their relation to IP has largely remained unaddressed for now. The recent signing of the Digital Markets Act and the ongoing negotiations on the proposal for a Data…
Users are increasingly prolonging the lifespan and value of a video game past its initial release date through user-generated content (UGC). The little-understood phenomenon of ‘watching other people play games’ is now a commonplace fact of life online. This phenomenon is responsible for creating game influencers, and those game influencers have also in turn created…
On June 7th, two years after its adoption, the deadline for implementing the DSM Directive finally expired. While academics and stakeholders have been critically dissecting its controversial provisions on platform liability, news aggregation and text & data mining, the Directive’s Chapter 3 (‘Fair remuneration in exploitation contracts of authors and performers’) has gone almost unnoticed,…
Summary The IPEC has held than an employee produced software in the course of his employment, despite his claims he did most of his work in his own time, at home, and on a personal computer. In the decision, Penhallurick v MD5 Limited [2021] EWHC 293 (IPEC), Hacon J suggested that such factors did not…
