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 The court, in an unpublished opinion, also affirmed a…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…
According to French law, to fall under the parody exception, the second work must evoke the pre-existing work and present significant differences from it so there is no possible confusion with the parodied work, as well as constitute a manifestation of humour and mockery. If the second work does not satisfy these conditions, and does…
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…
Pastiche is one of the newer harmonized user rights in EU copyright law. The exception for caricature, parody and pastiche was made mandatory as part of Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSMD) in 2019. Although the implementation deadline passed in 2021, several Member States have yet to transpose the…
Launched in January 2020, the H2020 project reCreating Europe (Rethinking digital copyright law for a culturally diverse, accessible, creative Europe), is pleased to announce its final conference, which will take place in Brussels on 21-22 March 2023. Day 1 will take place at the Royal Belgian Museum of Natural Sciences, while Day 2 will be…
