This is the second of a set of two blog posts (see Part 1 here) which analyses the limitations to parties’ freedom to determine the law applicable to contracts aimed at the exploitation of protected content online. It discusses the concept of overriding mandatory provisions and its potential application to relevant rules of (copyright) contract…

The online exploitation of content protected by copyright inherently entails cross-border aspects. Thus, the digital context of copyright exploitation contracts leads to questions of applicable law. Business-to-business contracting parties enjoy significant freedom in determining the law applicable to their contractual relationship. It makes commercial sense for parties to leverage their relative bargaining position to impose…

The principle of ‘de minimis’ is a common law principle that has been derived from the Latin maxim ‘De Mimimis Non-Curat Lex’, which essentially means that the law does not care for, nor take notice of, very small or trifling matters, and therefore does not require judicial scrutiny. This principle has not been statutorily recognized…

According to Article 16 EU DSM Directive 2019/790 (“DSM Directive”), a “publisher” may have a claim to a share of the author’s statutory remuneration claims – such as fair compensation for private copies – if the author has granted the “publisher” a right in his work. But who is this “publisher”? After the adoption of…

On 9 September 2022, Creative Commons issued their new FAQs on NFTs. This article provides a brief overview of the use of Creative Commons licensing in relation to NFTs based on the Creative Commons’ FAQ page linked above.   Creative Commons Licensing Most of you may well be familiar with the concept of Creative Commons…

It seems inevitable that UK copyright law will change at some stage. It increasingly appears that judges are waiting for a case which requires the inconsistencies between EU and UK copyright law to be addressed. Unfortunately, the recent decision in WaterRower v Liking [2022] EWHC 2084 (IPEC) was not that case, despite many reporting in…

Welcome to the third trimester of the 2022 round up of EU copyright law! In this series, we update readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. You can read the previous round-ups here. CJEU…

To reduce situations of economic lock-in, EU law increasingly grants portability rights: entitlements for beneficiaries to “claim back” certain data that they provided or created, and/or to have those data transferred directly from one party to another party of the beneficiary’s choice. As a follow-up to a previous post about the concept of portability and…

Data portability rights are hot in EU legislation. Although these rights are doomed to create conflicts with copyright, neighbouring rights and the sui generis right in databases, their relation to IP has largely remained unaddressed for now. The recent signing of the Digital Markets Act and the ongoing negotiations on the proposal for a Data…

This is not the first time that readers of the Kluwer Copyright Blog will have read about either the CDSM Directive or the reCreating Europe project. This post enriches the body of work in this area by summarizing the key findings of our two-phase empirical research on end-user flexibilities and end-user license agreements (EULAs) of…