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…

The limitation might have failed in an earlier period, but more recent precedents were more forgiving. Parties to a photo image license were free to contract for a two-year statute of limitations under California law, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held. The court, in an unpublished opinion, also affirmed a…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The European Commission has referred six Member States (Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Poland and Portugal) to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for failure to notify complete transposition measures on copyright in the Digital Single Market (Directive (EU) 2019/790) (CDSM Directive). This follows its decision last year to send reasoned opinions to 13…