The decade-long titanic battle between Oracle and Google over whether copyright law forbids unlicensed reimplementations of parts of the Java Application Program Interface (API) in a smartphone platform is finally over. In a blockbuster opinion for a 6-2 majority for the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer decisively supported Google’s fair use defense. The biggest…
Until recently, the French police’s handling of the yellow vest (gilets jaunes) demonstrations was ‘only’ criticized for excessive use of force (notably by the UN Human Rights Council). The “disproportionate” police behaviour was substantiated by extensive video footage recorded by protesters. To avoid videos of their agents’ interventions being shared on social networks, however, the…
In this new series we will be updating readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This will include Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. The end of 2020 Since this is the first issue of our round up, we have also…
On March 9th, 2021 the CJEU delivered its eagerly awaited decision on the VG Kunst case (C‑392/19). The facts of the case are interesting, since the question of the lawfulness of frame linking and of inline linking was not directly raised. Instead, it appears indirectly in the context of the assessment of licence terms requiring…
District court erred in ruling that a copyright infringement suit by a medical certification board against a physician for sending test questions to a test prep company was time-barred. The “discovery rule” in a copyright infringement case means that the three-year statute of limitations begins to run on the date of the discovery of the cause of…
An illustrated book titled “Oh, the Places You’ll Boldly Go!” did not make transformative use of Dr. Seuss’s copyrighted pictures and stories, although Lanham Act claims were properly dismissed under the Rogers test. In a closely watched copyright and trademark dispute over a “mash-up” book imitating and combining features of the works of author/illustrator Dr. Seuss and…
Rotary turntable control system’s technical drawings were not copyrightable, but underlying software source code could be, depending on full development of factual record. Whether the software source code for a rotary turntable control system was copyrightable raised a question of fact that required full development of a factual record, the U.S. Court of Appeals for…
In the last few months of 2020 there have been further developments in Italy with regards to private and administrative enforcement against illicit distribution of copyright content over the Internet. 1. New Italian case law against Content Delivery Network (CDN) operators In a 2019 post on this Blog (here), we analysed the impact of illegal…
Appellate court declines to reopen infringement judgment for a case that was not open on direct review. In a copyright infringement case brought by Christ Center of Divine Philosophy, Inc. for infringement of religious books and sound recordings, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver has refused to reopen a judgment awarding $80,000 for willful…
The reproduction of an author’s articles in a newspaper’s online archive was not protected from copyright infringement claims by Section 108(a) of the Copyright Act because this archive was not a “library” or “archive” within the meaning of this section. The author of two articles whose copyright infringement claims against a newspaper over the electronic…
