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…
On the 24th of May 2011 the European Commission has issued a Communication containing its Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) strategy. The document has a promising title: “A Single Market for Intellectual Property Rights. Boosting creativity and Innovation to provide economic growth, high quality jobs and first class products and services in Europe.” In short, the…
For years, consumer representatives, citizen rights groups and academics have lobbied for a better balance between the interests of rights holders and consumers in copyright law. In particular the use of technical and contractual restrictions on the ability of consumers to play, copy, share or transfer digital content to their liking has been a notorious…
On 16 June 2011 the Court of Justice of the European Union gave judgment in Case C-462/09, Stichting de Thuiskopie v. Opus Supplies Deutschland GmbH, Mijndert van der Lee and Hananja van der Lee (case C 462/09), a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden (the Dutch Supreme Court). As in…
On 24 May 2011, the European Commission announced a proposal for a directive on ‘certain permitted uses of orphan works’. This title perfectly conveys the scope of the proposal. Rather than adopting a generic approach to deal with the problem of orphan works, the Commission comes up with a set of measures designed for specific…
