Secrecy might be the new black for the ones using it. However, the rules introduced by the Lisbon Treaty and the rising public awareness of the need for transparency might mean that such fashion will be outdated soon in Europe. In the last couple of years, relevant laws and international agreements in the field of…
Last Friday, 13 January 2012, the conference “InfoSoc @ Ten: Ten Years after the EU Directive on Copyright in the Information Society” took place in the European Parliament. The conference, organized jointly by the IViR (University of Amsterdam) and the CRIDS (University of Namur), had an ambitious goal: to evaluate the achievements of the Information…
The New Year’s festivities are just behind us and with these the celebrations around Public Domain Day 2012 that took place in different cities in and outside Europe (Warsaw, Zurich, Turin, Rome, Haifa etc.). 2012 brings with it the joy of using James Joyce’s masterpieces without asking the estate for prior authorization (which more often…
On May 22 of this year Directive 2001/29/EC was exactly 10 years old – a birthday largely gone unnoticed. The ‘Copyright Directive’ or ‘Information Society Directive’ (for experts: ‘InfoSoc Directive’) marked an important stage in the process of harmonization of copyright and related rights in the European Union. In contrast to earlier directives that dealt…
Data creation, intellectual creation and creativity in the world of databases: The Advocate’s General Opinion in the Football Dataco Ltd v. Yahoo! Uk Limited Case and its potential impact in database copyright. What is a database? Are database copyright protection and database sui generis protection completely independent? What is the creativity level for asserting that…
On the 28 of October the European Commission adopted a Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. The Recommendation follows up on a similar Recommendation from 2006, updating for new developments such as the launch in 2008 of Europeana and the adoption of the Commission’s proposal for a Directive…
Copyright policy strategies at the EU level have been criticized by many, mainly academics. Critiques include, but are not limited to, the fact that copyright legislation tends to favour more the intermediaries and less the individual creator; or that the interests of users have been lost somewhere along the way. However, a couple of recent…
On 6 September 2011, General Advocate Verica Trstenjak released her Opinion on case C-277/10 (the original German version of the Opinion is available here, other language versions here). The case deals a.o. with the controversial cessio legis provision of the Austrian Urheberrechtsgesetz (Copyright Act – UrhG). According to this provision included in Art. 38(1) UrhG,…
Territorial licensing of media content has for some time now been a painful stumbling block in the realization of the EU’s ambitious vision for a common, European-wide audiovisual market. One, if not the most important reason why online audiovisual viewers are continuously reminded that the internet is not as borderless as they thought it was…
Guest Blog by Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley Law School Are programming languages, program functionality, and data interfaces protectable by copyright law or not? These questions were highly contentious in the United States during the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Plaintiffs in several cases argued that because these were parts of the “structure, sequence, and organization” (SSO) of…
