Not for the first time recently, have we seen the granting of copyright protection on a project of interior furnishing. Following the Court of Milan’s ruling which recognised copyright protection of Kiko’s concept stores, the Court of Venice was also called to pronounce – in the context of an interim proceedings – on the eligibility…
On 12 December 2018 Advocate General (AG) Szpunar delivered his Opinion in Case C-476/17, Pelham. The case concerns the practice of sampling, i.e. the reproduction of minimal parts of a phonogram for the purposes of using it in another phonogram. As harmonized by EU law, the phonogram producer holds a related right of reproduction (Article…
The Madrid Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal filed by the owners of a figurative mark whose central element is a radiant heart, drawn using thick black lines and coloured in red, this being used by the defendants to market numerous articles and souvenirs sold in many shops in Madrid. The Court upheld the first…
Introduction AGCOM is the Italian independent and convergent regulatory authority, established in 1997 by Law no. 249/1997 as the national media regulatory body. On 16th October 2018, AGCOM approved the deliberation no. 490/18/CONS (available here) which introduces some modifications and integrations to the Regulation on copyright enforcement in electronic communications networks (“AGCOM Regulation” or simply…
Website blocking injunction cases are complicated in Sweden because the Copyright Act requires contributory liability of the ISP, or in the case of interim injunctions – probable cause, for an injunction to be issued. While the reduced evidentiary burden for interim injunctions does not completely absolve a court from scrutinising the evidence, the legal context…
Josef K. was minding his own business when one morning, even though he knew he had done nothing wrong, he was arrested. This was the beginning of his trial. In his masterpiece entitled The Trial, Franz Kafka tells, among many things, the story of a man trying to interact with a preposterous system of justice….
The right of distribution is the least controversial of the three exclusive rights contained in the Information Society Directive (InfoSoc Directive). Yet, every now and then the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is asked to re-examine its scope. With far less interpretative imagination compared with the right of communication to the public,…
Estonian Authors’ Society (EAÜ), a collecting society that administers local and foreign authors’ economic rights in Estonia, sued SIA ADEONA, a Latvian music concert organizer, who organized a public concert in Estonia without acquiring a license for the public performance nor paying any license fee. In contrast to previous Estonian case law (EAÜ v. XXX,…
The Court reached the conclusion that since the cumulative criteria that formed the necessary condition for assessing “communication to the public” were not fulfilled, there was no communication of sound recordings to the public when a car rental company rented out rental cars equipped with a built-in radio. Consequently, Nordisk Biluthyrning was not liable to…
The Spanish Supreme Court dismissed the cassation appeal filed by the Spanish affiliate of the American group IMS HEALTH against the judgment of the Provincial Appellate Court of Madrid ordering them to pay damages of 5 million euros for misappropriating and selling part of the content of a database developed by the claimant company. INFONIS,…
