The Austrian Supreme Court has recently shed some light on the requirements for the admissible quotation of photos (judgment of 26 September 2017, 4Ob81/17s). In this case, a photographer had taken photos of a poacher who was killed in 1982. The competent collecting society sued a private TV-broadcasting station for their unauthorised use of one…
On 7 September 2017, AG Szpunar delivered his opinion on Case C-265/16, VCAST. The case concerns the question of whether the private copying exception covers the services of an online platform that allows users to store copies of free-to-air TV programmes in private cloud storage spaces. AG Szpunar’s proposed answer was a mixed one: while…
In a recent UK judgment, Neptune (Europe) Limited v deVOL Kitchens Limited, Neptune was unsuccessful in its claim against a fellow kitchen designer, DeVOL. DeVOL’s ‘Shaker’ kitchen was found not to have infringed the UK unregistered design rights (“UDR”) and a Registered Community Design (RCD) in Neptune’s ‘Chichester’ range. UDR was created to complement copyright…
Legal enforcement of open source software license violations, in particular violations of the General Public License (GPL), has been established in Germany for quite some time. Back in 2004, the Regional Court of Munich I granted an injunction confirming copyright infringement on the basis of a violation of the terms of the GPLv2 (judgment of…
A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law. The Estonian Authors’ Society (EAÜ) is a collecting society that administers authors’ economic rights in Estonia. The EAÜ sued a music concert organiser who had not acquired a corresponding licence for public performance of copyright works and had not paid a licence…
In the case Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft der Autoren, Komponisten und Musikverleger registrierte Genossenschaft mbH (AKM) V Zürs.net Betriebs GmbH (C-138/16, Judgment of 16 March 2017) the CJEU was called upon to decide once again on the seminal concept of communication to the public. The right of communication to the public, which has proved to be…
Microsoft Corp. established, as a matter of law, that several California retailers infringed the software giant’s copyrights and trademarks by selling 60 units of software, each of which included a counterfeit copy of Microsoft Windows 7 or Microsoft Office 2007, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has determined. A judgment against the retailers…
A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law and the case has been discussed on the Kluwer Copyright Blog here. The CJEU held that Article 9, particularly the concept of ‘access to cable of broadcasting services’, must be interpreted as not covering or permitting national legislation which provides that copyright…
On 14 June 2017, the CJEU handed down its highly anticipated decision in Case C-610/15, Stichting Brein v Ziggo. As was reported on this blog when the Advocate General’s Opinion was released, the case represents the first time that the liability proper (i.e. for damages, as opposed to mere injunctions) of an internet intermediary for…
Introduction On 30th March 2017, the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio (“TAR Lazio”) had the last word, at least from a domestic perspective, on the validity of the AGCOM (Italian Communication Authority) Regulation on copyright enforcement in electronic communications networks (“AGCOM Regulation” or simply the “Regulation”). This finding of validity is the final step in…
