Fashion is an industry largely led by seasonal trends. Status-conferring new designs are being launched bi-annually, during the Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer fashion shows, to meet the needs of our capitalistic society. Even though fashion designs are often inspired by the prior art, seasonal trends precondition innovation – new design themes that make the highly desirable…
Google prevails in what it has called “the copyright case of the decade.” Google LLC’s copying of approximately 11,000 lines of code from the Java SE application programming interface to create the Android mobile operating system was a fair use of that material as a matter of law and did not support copyright infringement by…
Debate on AI and IP continues Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (AI) or, more specifically, Machine Learning (ML) has become a hotly debated topic. It has attracted attention not only among academics but also increasingly among policy makers. The US government ran a consultation on AI and IP a few years ago. The UK government has…
There has been widespread press coverage of Meghan Markle’s (the Duchess of Sussex) recent success in a claim which she brought against the publishers of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and the Mail Online website (“the Mail”). In February 2021, the High Court granted Ms Markle summary judgment on her claim for misuse of…
On December 17, 2021, in a big win for electronic dance music (EDM) artists, the Dutch Supreme Court held that DJs own phonographic rights (neighbouring rights) in their home-produced recordings – not the record labels that commercially release them. The decision comes in a long-running dispute between world-famous Dutch DJ and EDM artist Martin Garrix…
“Web3 cannot and should not be reduced to blockchain when the real shift is towards user ownership of digital assets… This definitional shift focuses attention on what assets can be legally owned and the meaning of ownership “rights,” more generally, in the emerging digital spaces of web3.” The Rift Over Web3 The week before…
Fundamental Rights are the constants in many constitutional orders. They provide stability, continuity in values and encapsulate the normative skeleton of a society. Especially in times of change, they serve as guiding principles for citizens, governments and, if push comes to shove, the judiciary. Amongst the many examples in which fundamental rights have demonstrated their…
At the beginning of 2021, half a year before the implementation deadline of the DSM directive, only a single EU member state (the Netherlands) had passed a full implementation of the DSM directive. By the date of the implementation deadline a mere three Member States had fully implemented the directive, and by the end of…
At the end of 2021, YouTube’s first Copyright Transparency Report 2021 (“Report”) was published. It is interesting to look at this Report against the background of the 2019 EU rules for the liability of platforms like YouTube through the famous Art. 17 DSM Directive 2019/790 (“DSMD”). But first let’s take a look at Mars (the…
On 15 December 2020, the European Commission submitted a proposal for a Regulation on a Single Market For Digital Services (Digital Services Act, DSA) and amending Directive 2000/31/EC. In November 2021, the Council of the European Union reached agreement on an amended version of this proposal, and on 20 December 2021, the European Parliament’s Committee…
