While EU Member States are implementing the newly introduced press publishers’ right into their national laws, Australia is about to introduce its own version of the right. On 31 July 2020, the Australian government announced the Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2020 (draft News Media Bargaining Code). While the…
The first part of this blogpost analysed the main theoretical foundations of the AG’s Opinion in the VG Bild-Kunst case (C‑392/19). The second part focuses on the application of this theoretical background to frame links and inline (automatic) links. As will be shown, the AG has proposed a methodological model of distinction between hyperlinks on…
On September 10, 2020 the Advocate General (AG) Maciej Szpunar delivered his Opinion on the case of VG Bild-Kunst v Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitzanother (C‑392/19), a further case concerning the legality of linking. The assessment of linking from an EU copyright law perspective appears to be a labyrinthine legal exercise, since, following the seminal Svensson (C‑466/12)…
The reproduction of an author’s articles in a newspaper’s online archive was not protected from copyright infringement claims by Section 108(a) of the Copyright Act because this archive was not a “library” or “archive” within the meaning of this section. The author of two articles whose copyright infringement claims against a newspaper over the electronic…
As I posted previously on this blog (here), French press publishers’ unions and the news agency Agence France Presse (‘AFP’) filed a successful request for an interim injunction against Google before the French Competition Authority, in their battle to obtain remuneration for online uses of their publications (Decision 20-MC-01 of 9 April 2020). Google had been manoeuvring…
Because the copyright owner had held the book out as nonfiction, the “asserted truths” doctrine precluded the owner from later claiming copyright protection for facts contained in it. The members of the pop music quartet The Four Seasons and the producers of the hit musical “Jersey Boys” were entitled to post-verdict judgment as a matter…
Lower court ruling dismissing claims accusing HP of selling unauthorized software updates was reversed on appeal. Claims of direct and indirect infringement by Hewlett Packard and a third party in connection with software updates for Oracle’s Solaris operating system were time-barred to the extent Oracle failed to investigate suspicions of misconduct, the Ninth Circuit has…
The story of Austria’s copyright levy on storage media (storage media levy, briefly “SML”) is not over: In its latest chapter, the Austrian courts – and now also the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) – have to deal with the Austrian legislation once more and this time with a view to cloud…
Part 1 of this blog post introduced the claim by rightsholders and some other commentators that Article 17 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive) is a mere clarification of existing Court of Justice case-law on communication to the public and intermediary liability. The second part of this blog…
EU Member States are currently grappling with the task of implementing the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive) into national law. The European Commission is preparing its guidance to help national legislators make sense of its most controversial part, Article 17. These legislative developments have prompted a series of remarkably similar…
