By now everyone in the world must have heard of Sweden, especially European copyright lawyers. This post concerns two recent preliminary rulings from the CJEU, both at the request of Swedish courts. As both involved the communication to the public right, and both led the CJEU to pronounce the infrequently heard incantation that Article 3…
In the last few months of 2020 there have been further developments in Italy with regards to private and administrative enforcement against illicit distribution of copyright content over the Internet. 1. New Italian case law against Content Delivery Network (CDN) operators In a 2019 post on this Blog (here), we analysed the impact of illegal…
Substantial similarity was lacking because the TV show used reported facts in combination with tone, dialogue, and themes that were different from the book. Scenes in the Netflix drama Narcos did not infringe the copyright of Virginia Vallejo, who wrote a memoir about her relationship with Pablo Escobar, because historical facts are not copyrightable, and the plot,…
On Tuesday, November 10, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU or Court) heard case C-401/19. This case is a request by the Polish government to annul the filtering obligation contained in Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive on the grounds that it will lead to censorship…
Appellate court declines to reopen infringement judgment for a case that was not open on direct review. In a copyright infringement case brought by Christ Center of Divine Philosophy, Inc. for infringement of religious books and sound recordings, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver has refused to reopen a judgment awarding $80,000 for willful…
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…
