Jurisdiction

CDSM Directive, Digital Single Market, European Union, Making available (right of), Press Publishers ’ Right, Remuneration (equitable)

(CREATe, University of Glasgow)/ /Leave a comment

On 21st October 2021, Facebook announced that it has reached an agreement with APIG, an association of French press publishers, committing itself to the payment of licensing fees pursuant to the press publishers’ right introduced by the 2019 Copyright Directive. According to Facebook’s press release, the agreement “means that people on Facebook will be able…

Case Law, USA

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory)/ /Leave a comment

Although the author worked under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement when he penned the movie, the right to ownership was governed by copyright law and not labor law. The writer of the screenplay for Friday the 13th, the classic summer camp thriller that spawned a generation of equally campy horror films, was entitled to…

Case Law, Infringement, USA

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US)/ /Leave a comment

De minimis analysis involves the substantiality of the copying, not the use to which the infringing work is put; by definition, wholesale copying of a protected work cannot be de minimis copying. A company that owned a website on which it unknowingly displayed a photographer’s photo without authorization could not assert a de minimis defense…

CDSM Directive, Digital Single Market, European Union, Liability

(Bournemouth University)/ /Leave a comment

On the 16th of October 2020, one year ago, a middle-school teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded by a terrorist who would not know of his existence if not for a number of videos posted on social media, against which Mr. Paty had filed for defamation with the local police. Yet, a law against publishing heinous…

Brexit, Distribution (right of), Exhaustion, United Kingdom

, (Bristows LLP)/ /Leave a comment

The UK government has run a consultation on the future of the UK’s exhaustion of IP rights regime. This ran for 12 weeks, closing on 31 August 2021. The consultation was open to responses from businesses, representative organisations, civil society organisations, legal practitioners, creators and consumers. The government is now considering the responses to the…

Case Law, USA

(Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory US)/ /Leave a comment

Heirs of “Game of Life” developer failed to overcome work-for-hire doctrine in bid to terminate developer’s original transfer of rights to Hasbro predecessor. The federal district court in Providence, Rhode Island, correctly determined that heirs of toy developer Bill Markham could not reacquire copyrights to the boardgame “The Game of Life” from Hasbro, Inc., and…

AG Opinion, Case Law, CJEU, Digital Single Market, European Union, Round-up

(University College London) and (Institute for Information Law (IViR))/ /Leave a comment

Welcome to the third trimester of 2021 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 first and second trimester round…

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Australia, Authorship, Case Law, Ownership

(Macquarie Law School)/ /1 Comment

In July this year, the Federal Court of Australia handed down a decision in Stephen L. Thaler [2021] APO 5, which allowed listing AI system DABUS as an inventor in a patent application. It is interesting to explore what implications this decision could have in the field of copyright. About the DABUS decision The DABUS case refers…

European Union, Legislative process

(GFF (Society for Civil Rights)) and (Institute for Information Law (IViR))/ /Leave a comment

We have recently published a white paper, authored by Julia Reda (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte) and Paul Keller (Open Future) that proposes to build a public repository of Public Domain and openly licensed works. While the idea of creating repositories of Public Domain and openly licensed works is not new as such, we are proposing to…

Egypt, Enforcement, Infringement, Injunction, Legislative process, Liability

(Reed Smith LLP - Paris)/ /1 Comment

The growing proclivity of issuing “dynamic injunctions” to block the online illegal diffusion and distribution of audio-visual copyrighted content has recently caught the attention of several scholars (see here, here and here). In fact, the preventive nature of the rights involved, the need to preclude imminent damage, and the fact that most IP addresses targeted…