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…

“No artist starts from scratch in a vacuum”. This finding of the Berlin Regional Court seems obvious. But copyright law faces daunting challenges when copyrighted material not only inspires a creative process, but becomes the very object of it. From Italian opera to Andy Warhol to memes – incorporating and referencing other works has always…

The members of the European Copyright Society (ECS) have recently sent a letter to Mr. Thierry Breton (Commissioner for Internal Market, European Commission) outlining their view of what should be the priorities for a future agenda in the field of copyright law. The letter is available here and its contents are reproduced below.   The…

The H2020 project reCreating Europe performed an unprecedented mapping of EU and Member States’ sources on copyright flexibilities. Part I of this blog post explained the mapping of EU sources and their conclusions. Part II deals with the comparative analysis of the law of all 27 Member States, with related comparative findings. The mapping of…

TLDR   Generative AI is one of the hot topics in copyright law today. In the EU, a crucial legal issue is whether using in-copyright works to train generative AI models is copyright infringement or falls under existing text and data mining (TDM) exceptions in the Copyright in Digital Single Market (CDSM) Directive. In particular,…

The removal of SIAE’s repertoire from Meta’s social networks “This song is currently unavailable” or “The audio track in your reel is no longer available. You can replace the audio track once, which will also remove any original audio in your reel”. These are some of the messages appearing on Instagram or Facebook to users…

Welcome to the first trimester of the 2023 round up of EU copyright law! In this edition, we report on an AG Opinion that came out late in 2022 and update you on what has happened in the first trimester of 2023 in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court…

This post is based in part on the Position Statement of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition of 23 January 2023 on the ‘Design Package’, but expresses the authors’ own personal views.     On 28 November 2022, the EU Commission published proposals for amendment of the Design Regulation and for recast of…

Despite the increasing use of streaming services, where media content is not stored on local devices, but merely accessed online, the private copying exception (Art 5(2)(b) InfoSoc Directive) remains at the center of European jurisprudence.  In the Austro-Mechana v. Strato case, the Austrian courts have to decide whether the remuneration for private copying must also be…

In August 2020, a review of the Orphan Works Directive (2012/28/EU), or OWD, was initiated by the European Commission. The study concluded that the OWD has had limited practical impact, but the European Commission has not proposed any modifications to the Directive. This post provides a short introduction to the OWD, an overview of the…