BELGIUM – In a case of SABAM (the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers) versus a counterfeits dealer, the Belgian Supreme Courts finds that in litigations against copyright infringers, collecting societies can prove the existence of management contracts pertaining to some works by solely producing the official repertoire listing that they mandatorily have to…
DENMARK – An end user of the Direct Connect file sharing network was found liable for copyright infringements. However, the Supreme Court did not agree with the right holders (respondents) that the extent of the infringements was sufficiently documented and overturned the evidence (a list of files) provided by right holders. Also, the Supreme Court…
On 3 May 2011, the Paris Court of Appeal dismissed the claims of copyright infringement brought by the Syndicat National de l’Edition Phonographique (SNEP- trade association of the French recording industry) against Google. Since 2008, the search engine is proposing a service, Google Suggest, which guesses and suggests a list of keywords in real time…
On 2 May 2011 the Ministry of Culture in Portugal made public a law proposal concerning the regulation of private copying levies (the English version of which is unfortunately not available). The law currently in force dates from 2004 and had in turn made some changes to the original law, dated from 1998. There have…
The commented decision may at first glance appear to be of limited importance only, but after closer examination it contains two interesting points of more general significance. The basic facts are the following: the plaintiff, a collecting society ZAIKS, brought a claim against two companies demanding payment for selling copies of the film “Rejs” (“Cruise”),…
[By Luke McDonagh) The Irish Times has today reported that the copyright in the Irish national anthem is due to expire next year. When the copyright in “A Soldier’s Song”, or as it is known in its Irish language version, “Amhrán na bhFiann”, expires at the end of 2012, the debate is expected to reopen…
On April 11, 2011, the Dutch secretary of state, Fred Teeven, sent his long awaited ‘Priorities Letter Copyright 20@20 ” to the House of Representatives. Among the priorities mentioned, is ‘the promotion and protection of new business models on the Internet through a bill to combat infringing websites and facilitating a re-evaluation of the private…
The Advocate General’s Opinion in Case C-145/10, Painer v Standard VerlagsGmbH et al., parts of which have already been discussed in an earlier blog post (here), also deals with the copyrightability of portrait photos. In this case, German and Austrian newspaper publishers had published portrait photos of Natascha Kampusch, and a photo-fit based on one…
On 12 April 2011, Advocate General Trstenjak delivered her Opinion in Case C-145/10, Painer v Standard VerlagsGmbH et al., in which the ECJ has been asked to give preliminary guidance on various questions concerning copyright in portrait photos used in news reports. Eva-Maria Painer, a professional photographer, produced portrait photos of Natascha Kampusch prior to…
In the appeal of a case concerning allegations of infringement of IP rights in live football statistics sites, the Court of Appeal rejected the claimant’s copyright claim, affirming the high standard of subsistence in a database under Article 3(1) which must go beyond ‘mere data’ to involve some ‘creative skill’. Concerning the sui generis right,…
