Both the US and the EU now have basic copyright terms of the life of the author plus 70 years. But when US authors simultaneously publish in Canada, they may end up truncating their term of copyright in the EU. Moreover, simultaneous Canadian publication decades ago could have an immediate effect on works by US…
“The activity of the operator of a dedicated meta search engine (…) comes close to the manufacture of a parasitical competing product.” Christmas somewhat overshadowed the publication of a particularly interesting CJEU decision: case C-202/12 (Innoweb), dealing with the legal protection of databases in relation to meta search engines. The judgment was published on 19…
“The first question (territoriality) and the last question (single EU copyright title) could be considered as the alpha and the omega of the questionnaire and they are interlinked in various ways.” A public consultation on the review of EU copyright rules was launched by the European Commission a few days ago . The consultation refers…
By Valentina Moscon, Scholarship holder at the Max Planck Institute & University of Trento The Italian Parliament recently approved a new law concerning the valorization of culture (Law of October 7, 2013, n. 112, G.U. n. 236, 8.10.2013). The law includes, in section 4, a regulation for Open Access (OA) to scientific publications. With this new…
“For the ECJ, in the meaning of Article 5(3) of the Regulation 44/2001, a harmful event may arise from the possibility of obtaining a reproduction of a work from an internet site accessible within the jurisdiction of the court seised.” In its judgement Pinckney v. KDG Mediatech AG of 3 October 2013 (case C-170/12), the…
“If my reasoning is correct, the AG’s conclusion on this specific point (no legal protection must be granted to TPMs which are not used to prevent or inhibit acts of infringement) is much more innovative than the AG herself seems to acknowledge.” On 19 September, Eleanor Sharpston, Advocate General of the Court of Justice of…
A relatively new feature on the different Kluwer Legal Blogs (e.g. the KluwerPatentBlog and the KluwerArbitrationBlog) is the so-called legal Blog Poll. Not only because it is always nice to hear what the communis opinio is about recent developments in jurisprudence and legislative procedures or about new or revived theories and ideas, but also to…
“”The difficulty also lies in the fact that (to our knowledge) no levy system within the EU provided before Padawan for such a distinction and that the structure of the payment system did/does not lend itself easily to making such a distinction.” There’s nothing wrong with a private copying levy, the CJEU decided in SGAE/Padawan,…
“In essence, the disputes relate to the collecting societies’ intent to have intermediary suppliers pay levies on computers, printers and or plotters marketed in Germany. The suppliers, for their part, argued that some of the devices in question (namely printers and plotters) are incapable of autonomous copying.” On June 27, 2013, the CJEU delivered its…
“Before finalising its decision however, it is seeking the CJEU’s input on whether end users, who view web-pages on their computers without downloading or printing them, are committing infringements of copyright if they lack a licence from the rightholder.” On 29 June 2013 the UK Supreme Court referred a series of questions in Case C-360/13 Public…
