Ministers from six European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, The Netherlands and Sweden) have written a joint letter to the European Commission regarding the need for a legislative proposal on rules and boundaries of international application of EU law on copyright and neighbouring rights. The English version of the letter is available here. The letter…
The European AI Office is currently facilitating the drawing-up of the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (the “Code”). The European Commission published the first draft of the Code on 14 November 2024. Further drafts are to be prepared, with the final version of the Code forecast to be released by 2 May 2025, in accordance…
Yesterday, the European Copyright Society (ECS) published its Opinion on the CJEU MIO/konektra cases C- 580/23 and C-795/23 (originality and infringement test of works of applied art). The Executive Summary is reproduced below and the full Opinion is available here: ecs-opinion-mio-konektra.pdf Executive summary Background. In Cofemel, the CJEU recognized that (i) the standard test…
Introduction The interaction between the AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) and the exceptions for text and data mining (TDM) in the CDSM Directive is one of the most important topics in EU copyright law today. One particularly controversial point of intersection is the AI Act’s attempt, through recital 106, to give extraterritorial effect to its copyright-related…
In its latest opinion, the European Copyright Society has reviewed the German Federal Court of Justice’s (BGH) referral in the Pelham II (a.k.a. Metall auf Metall) case. Although the beginning of the legal dispute dates back to 1999, a quarter century seemed to be not enough to answer all possible questions surrounding the sampling of a…
Just seven weeks after the release of the AG’s Opinion the Kwantum v. Vitra case was decided by the European Court. For Dutch background and early criticism, see my earlier blog. The main question asked to the Court was whether a Member State may unilaterally apply the Berne Convention’s rule of material reciprocity (Article 2(7)…
Code as a literary work Following lengthy discussion in the 1970s and 1980s, by 1991 in the EU and 1994 at the WTO level, the legal status of computer programs was a settled matter: software was to be treated under copyright as a literary work. Source code and object code are protected by copyright. As…
Once again, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will be asked to provide clarity on the concept of “communication to the public” as laid down in article 3 of the 2001 Copyright in the Information Society Directive (InfoSoc Directive). On 20 September 2024, the Dutch Supreme Court expressed its intention to refer…
The European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) has for many years supported the move away from proprietary models of scholarly publishing towards Open Access (OA).[1] ALLEA, therefore, welcomes the recognition in the laws of an increasing number of European countries of so-called ‘Secondary Publication Rights’ (SPRs) that allow publicly funded researchers to…
The Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with Kluwer Law International, publisher of the Information Law Series, has launched an online archive of older book volumes published in the series. The Information Law Series, which was established in 1991, is the world’s first and foremost academic book series in…
