Pastor and church who sent YouTube DMCA takedown notices for videos of sermons posted on operator’s channel had good faith belief that videos were infringing. An ongoing dispute between a church and its pastor and a YouTube channel operator has been put to rest by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which affirmed the…

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 The judgment in PRS v Qatar Airways [2020] EWHC 1872 considers an interesting jurisdiction challenge in the context of international air travel.  In December 2019, PRS issued a claim in the UK against Qatar Airways (QA) for a declaration that QA infringed the worldwide performing rights in its musical works, an injunction to prevent…

On 24 April 2020, the Federal Court of Australia handed down a decision in the case Boomerang Investments Pty Ltd v Padgett (Liability) [2020] FCA 535 which concerned the copying of substantial parts of the iconic Australian pop-hit classic ‘Love is in the air’ by the US band, Glass Candy, and by the French airline…

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)….

District court properly dismissed claims by United States pizza chain, finding no infringing acts in the United States. Neither the Copyright Act nor the Lanham Act apply extraterritorially to claims by a United States pizza chain against a pizzeria in Edinburgh, Scotland, which allegedly copied the architectural design, and the look and feel of the…

Blocking injunctions against internet service providers (ISPs) remain one of the most interesting and litigated issues of contemporary copyright law. Though the concept of blocking injunctions per se is firmly established on the basis of CJEU case law (C‑324/09 L’Oréal, C-70/10 Scarlet Extended, C-360/10 Sabam and the seminal C-314/12 UPC Telekabel), blocking injunction jurisprudence in…

In addition to the low likelihood of success on the merits, the threat of imminent harm was eliminated, given that the Christmas show that Enchant sought to stop had already come and gone. The denial of a preliminary injunction by a Nashville federal court in a copyright infringement case involving holiday animal sculptures on the…

Register’s opinion needed to determine validity of textile designer’s “single-unit registration” for 31 separate designs that were not released at the same time. In a case in which textile designer Unicolors, Inc., obtained a jury verdict against retailer H&M for copyright infringement involving designs printed on garments, the Ninth Circuit has reversed and remanded, ordering…