Tackling the blurred lines between counterfeiting and ingenuity in the art world is certainly not an easy endeavor. Indeed, in a world where “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed“, it is a rather daunting exercise for any court to draw the line between inspiration and imitation in copyrighted works, let alone in…

In June 2023 the U.S. Copyright Office celebrated the one-year anniversary of operations of the Copyright Claims Board (“CCB”), a novel new small claims court housed within the agency with a budget request for $2.2 million in ongoing yearly costs. Though not entirely unique (e.g., the UK’s IP Enterprise court has been described as filling…

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. Part 1 looked at the state of the art of the video game industry, as well as at cloning and cheating. This part…

Grand Production d.o.o. v GO4YU GmbH (Case C‑423/21) The facts of the case are representative of the grey areas of the application of copyright territoriality in the digital era. The applicant, Grand Production d.o.o., is a Serbian company which produces television programs that are broadcast in Serbia by a TV channel, Prva Srpska Televizija. Another…

The decisions of the BGH (German Federal Court of Justice) in “YouTube II”, “uploaded II” and “uploaded III” have changed things, at least for hosting providers, in one key aspect: hosting providers can now be (indirectly) liable for the copyright infringements committed by their users, if those hosting providers violate duties of care. This post…

Welcome to the fourth (and last) trimester of the 2022 round up of EU copyright law (even though slightly overdue)! While in the last three months of 2022 the CJEU was relatively quiet, the various EU policymakers have been very productive. In this series, we update readers every three months on developments in EU copyright…

To reduce situations of economic lock-in, EU law increasingly grants portability rights: entitlements for beneficiaries to “claim back” certain data that they provided or created, and/or to have those data transferred directly from one party to another party of the beneficiary’s choice. As a follow-up to a previous post about the concept of portability and…

In Safarov v. Azerbaijan (Appl. no. 885/12) the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) finds that the defendant State violated Article 1 of Protocol No.1 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). In its judgment of 1 September 2022, the Court determines that Azerbaijan failed to enforce copyright…

In the context of the reCreating Europe project a recent interdisciplinary report was published on Copyright Content Moderation in the EU. The report addresses the following main research question: how can we map the impact on access to culture in the Digital Single Market (DSM) of content moderation of copyright-protected content on online platforms? This…