On April 11, 2011, the Dutch secretary of state, Fred Teeven, sent his long awaited ‘Priorities Letter Copyright 20@20 ” to the House of Representatives. Among the priorities mentioned, is ‘the promotion and protection of new business models on the Internet through a bill to combat infringing websites and facilitating a re-evaluation of the private…
In the appeal of a case concerning allegations of infringement of IP rights in live football statistics sites, the Court of Appeal rejected the claimant’s copyright claim, affirming the high standard of subsistence in a database under Article 3(1) which must go beyond ‘mere data’ to involve some ‘creative skill’. Concerning the sui generis right,…
By Luke McDongagh, PhD Candidate, QMIPRI The Irish Times has recently reported that the Joyce estate has, after many years of refusal, finally granted the English singer Kate Bush permission to use the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy from James Joyce’s seminal novel Ulysses as the lyrical basis for a song. The soliloquy, spoken at the…
As a follow up to my previous post on the Google decisions, I am presenting a recent report issued by two senators (Mr. Laurent Béteille and Mr. Richard Yung) on the application of the anti-counterfeiting law (loi n. 2007-1544 of 29 October 2007 de lutte contre la contrefaçon). The report contains 18 recommendations aimed at…
The Communications Authority proposal to have a leading role in the protection of copyright on electronic communication networks (as explained in its Resolution 668/10/CONS commented in the previous post) has provoked opposite reactions from copyright owners on one side and supporters of major ISPs on the other side. The Italian federation for the protection against…
The use of a photograph of a politician with a child, in combination with a satirical text, in a self-advertisement of a news magazine, is not covered by the freedom of satire when the satire does not concern daily political events but is merely commercially self-serving. Furthermore, the implication of a political relationship between the…
In this decision the Court of Cassation confirmed that Dailymotion was an online intermediary provider, who did not intervene in the content and choice of videos posted by users on its platform. In addition, the commercial exploitation of the website through the sale of advertising spaces did not induce that Dailymotion could intervene on the…
What is and what is not a copyright work is a question even copyright lawyers find difficult to answer when confronted with subject matter on the verge of the required standard of originality. Polish copyright law has quite a long tradition of setting the threshold rather low, which may encourage frivolous lawsuits forcing courts to…
Two contradictory legislative proposals have been quite recently submitted for discussion at the Belgian Parliament, which should implement solutions to the thorny file-sharing issue. On the one hand, Senators Morael and Pyryns proposed on 9 December 2010 [Doc 5-590/1] a law “aiming at adapting the perception of copyright to the technological evolution while preserving privacy…
In four recent decisions (respectively relating to the movies “le génocide arménien”; “l’affaire Clearstream”; “les dissimulateurs” and “Mondovino”), the Paris Court of Appeal held Google liable for copyright infringement. The facts of the different cases are similar: an Internet user had placed an unauthorized copy of a movie on Google Video. Following the procedure set…
