WIPO negotiators appear prepared to approve a draft Broadcast Treaty that is no longer “signal-based” or limited to “traditional” (non-Internet-based) broadcasting.   There is a significant push at this week’s meetings of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights to approve a Diplomatic Conference on a Broadcasting Organizations Treaty…

Context Copyright can be challenging for cultural institutions (or “GLAM“ for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) when pursuing digitization and dissemination activities, as copyright governs whether a given work can be used and if so, how (as shown in recent studies for museums, archives or libraries). These challenges lead to a need to support legislative…

Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at the Columbia Law School Jane C. Ginsburg recently visited London, where she delivered her lecture in memory of a well-known legal scholar – Professor William (Bill) Rodolph Cornish. Described as “an intellectual property pioneer and modern legal historian”, his untimely death in January 2022 was a blow…

The 42nd session of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) took place from 9 to 13 May 2022 in Geneva. This was the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic started that most of the delegates were reunited in person. In 2020 and 2021, the Committee held hybrid…

In late 2020, the Supreme Court of New Zealand gave judgment on copyright aspects of the dispute on whether Kim Dotcom and other’s involved in the Megagroup businesses should be extradited from New Zealand to the United States because of criminal copyright infringement. This episode, in a case which has involved multiple legal contests, was…

Introduction A few weeks ago, the “International Instrument on Permitted Uses in Copyright Law” (hereinafter, the Instrument) was published with open access. The Instrument is the outcome of an international academic initiative that brought together around twenty outstanding copyright experts from various countries around the world. The group of experts convened its first meeting in…

The global intellectual property landscape has witnessed important changes in recent years. Most notably, the public interest dimension of intellectual property has emerged as a paramount concern. Though there seems to be a fairly broad agreement on the need for a more balanced intellectual property system which effectively promotes innovation, views diverge on how to…