The Robber Hotzenplotz is the title of a book series for children, written by Ottfried Preußler. The figure of robber Hotzenplotz is characterized on the book cover by a huge black hat, a red band and a feather. A political party incorporated the face of the Austrian city’s mayor into the drawing of robber…
With an order (Cass., ord. no.11413/2024) that suprisingly triggered little attention, at the end of last April the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) proffered yet once more its original approach and reading of the principles inspiring the EU copyright harmonization – and particularly of those developed by the CJEU case law. This time,…
The district court erred in taking the statute of limitations into account in determining who was the prevailing party. A defendant in a copyright infringement action is not the prevailing party for purposes of the attorney fee statute where the plaintiff has voluntarily dismissed its case without prejudice—even if that plaintiff would be barred by…
Generative AI (GenAI) is promising to revolutionise higher education. Whether it concerns legal scholars using ChatGPT to write their essays, computer science majors relying on GitHub Copilot to generate programming code, or art students turning to Midjourney to create visual artistry: the relevant AI tools to assist with educational assignments are readily available online. The…
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…
Although large, general purpose AI (GPAI) or “foundation” models and their generative products have been around for several years, it was ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 which captured the public and media’s imagination as well as large amounts of venture capital funding. Since then, large models generating not just text and image but also video,…
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is about to write yet another chapter in the never-ending, or so it seems, ‘Metall auf Metall’ saga. The facts of the case are all too familiar by now: in 2004, German band Kraftwerk took hip hop producer Moses Pelham to court for copyright infringement after…
The rise in popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has attracted a great deal of attention from copyright practitioners and aficionados. And why is that? Basically, because an NFT is an encoded digital metadata file of a copy of a work that can be copyright protected. That is, in an NFT there can be an underlying…
On 19 March 2024, the Court of Appeal handed down its decision on the appeal in the Lidl v Tesco case ([2024] EWCA Civ 262), holding as follows. First instance (High Court) decision Court of Appeal ruling Copyright infringement Overturned (appeal allowed) Trade mark infringement Upheld (appeal dismissed) Passing off Upheld (appeal dismissed) Trade…
The Austrian Supreme Court (hereinafter: “ASC”) ruled on 19th of December 2023 (4 Ob 112/23h) in a case concerning the 2019 film “Yesterday”. The Plaintiff alleged that the film infringed its copyright in a short screenplay idea published in 2011. The First Defendant distributes the film “Yesterday” to Austrian cinemas. The Second Defendant is responsible…
