As succinctly noted by Susan Bischoff in a prior post, the ongoing legal saga surrounding the ‘Metall auf Metall’ case continues to yield legal insights. Presently, a new reference from the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) asks the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for vital interpretive guidance concerning the parody exception…
The US class action against Google Bard (J.L. v. Alphabet Inc, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-03440) In a recent post we analysed a class action filed in the US against Open AI for unauthorized use of copyright works for training of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT (here) (“Generative…
In Greek mythology, the saga of Sisyphus personifies relentless and never-ending toil – condemned by the gods to an eternity of pushing a massive boulder up a steep hill, only to watch it roll back down again as he nears the summit. With 24 years of legal proceedings and a dozen court rulings behind them,…
With the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) restarting its activities after the vacation break, we look back to one of the late-summer judgement, standing out for its technical, yet impactful character. In Case C-426/21, the CJEU looked into the complicated relationship between copyright law and online television services. The focus of the case…
In June 2023 the U.S. Copyright Office celebrated the one-year anniversary of operations of the Copyright Claims Board (“CCB”), a novel new small claims court housed within the agency with a budget request for $2.2 million in ongoing yearly costs. Though not entirely unique (e.g., the UK’s IP Enterprise court has been described as filling…
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that a copyright dispute regarding a fire-breathing–sneezing dragon would get so heated. The case of Evans v John Lewis Plc & Anor [2023] EWHC 766 (IPEC) is a copyright infringement claim in which the IPEC (a specialist IP court in the UK) was asked to decide whether John Lewis’s…
In a case between Google and the creator of the font used by the French newspaper Le Monde, the Paris Court of First Instance (‘Tribunal Judiciaire’) has handed down a judgment in which it ruled that the font created for the newspaper is original and thus protected by copyright, even though it found that Google’s…
“No artist starts from scratch in a vacuum”. This finding of the Berlin Regional Court seems obvious. But copyright law faces daunting challenges when copyrighted material not only inspires a creative process, but becomes the very object of it. From Italian opera to Andy Warhol to memes – incorporating and referencing other works has always…
In March 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the Second Circuit’s ruling that Andy Warhol’s series of colorful prints and drawings of Prince were not transformative fair uses of Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph (for a previous comment on this case, see here). Vanity Fair magazine had commissioned Warhol’s artwork in 1984 to accompany an article…
Another court of appeals concludes that the statute of limitations doctrine was not overturned by a Supreme Court laches decision. The Supreme Court did not upend the longstanding discovery rule applicable to Copyright Act cases by merely mentioning in passing that a copyright claim accrues “when an infringing act occurs,” the U.S. Court of Appeals…
