Earlier this year, the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) issued an order (Cass., ord. no.11413/2024) in a case concerning the protection by copyright of a lamp design. Part I of this post outlined the decisions issued as the case made its way through the Italian court system. Part II will now turn to the…

  With an order (Cass., ord. no.11413/2024) that suprisingly triggered little attention, at the end of last April the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) proffered yet once more its original approach and reading of the principles inspiring the EU copyright harmonization – and particularly of those developed by the CJEU case law. This time,…

The AI Law Proposal: general context and subject matter     On 23 April 2024, the Italian government published the text of a draft law introducing regulatory provisions concerning the use of Artificial Intelligence systems to the Italian legal system (“AI Law Proposal”) (here). The text has been approved by the Council of Ministers and…

For more than seven decades, international law has consistently led countries to embrace culture as a global and cross-border value for humanity. The human right to cultural participation has become a pillar of protecting and empowering individuals and communities. At the EU level, the competence to legislate on cultural matters is mostly left to the…

Introduction One of the main contentious points when artificial intelligence, deep learning or machine learning (for the distinction between these functionalities, see here) are used for generating creative works is the question of attribution of works to an author, usually a human who has used the tech tool with some level of involvement in the…

On 20 April 2023, the Italian Civil Court of first instance of Florence (Tribunale civile di Firenze) issued a decision that held unlawful the reproduction by lenticular technique of the image of Michelangelo’s David and its juxtaposition with the image of a male model on the cover of GQ magazine. The reproduction was not authorized…

The Italian Antitrust authority (AGCM) has launched an investigation to assess whether the conduct of META towards SIAE, the largest Italian copyright collecting society, is unlawful due to abuse of economic dependence (for a previous post on the copyright dimension of the META v. SIAE dispute, see here). Let’s start with the background. META and…

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…

In late 2022, the Court of Venice issued an interesting order restraining the use of the image of a well-known piece of Renaissance art by Leonardo da Vinci: the Study of the Proportions of the Human Body in the Manner of Vitruvius, also known as the Vitruvian Man.[1] The artwork is held by the Italian…

On 30 December 2022, the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) issued an order that intervened again on the interpretation of the quotation exception under Article 70 of the Italian Copyright Act (l. 633/1941, l.aut.). The decision concerns an advertising campaign of a mineral water company. The commercial video promoting the mineral water features a…