In France, search engines using thumbnails are likely to infringe on copyright. On 8 April 2014, a French Senator proposed a Bill to establish compulsory collective management for the reproduction of photographs and images by search engine services. Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of photographs and images, used by search engines such as Google Images in…

By Raquel Xalabarder, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya “This ruling is very good news for the recent doctrinal attempts to bring some flexibility in the way copyright laws are being interpreted and applied.  It is difficult to predict the impact that this ruling may have in successive case law, but it is certainly an important milestone…

The dust has now settled on the Hargreaves Review – officially known as “A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth” – which was published during May 2011. The main focus of Professor Ian Hargreaves’s review was copyright law and he made a number of interesting recommendations in this area. Firstly, one of the major points…

Discussions around a fair use defence are not new in The Netherlands. Already in the years immediately following the adoption of the EU Copyright Directive, the idea of introducing a fair use defence in the Dutch Copyright Act had given rise to heated debate, at least in the literature. The debate recently resurged when the…