The Court of Justice of the EU has handed down its judgment (18 December 2019, Case C-666/18) following the request for a preliminary ruling from the Paris Court of Appeal (IT Development v Free Mobile, 16 October 2018, No 17/02679; see our post here). In answer to the question: does the breach of a software…
17 U.S.C. §412 precluded developer of honey harvesting aid from seeking statutory damages for mail-order seller’s copying of advertising text in catalogue. The suit by the developer of a honey harvesting aid used by beekeepers alleging that a mail-order business infringed his copyright in advertising copy for the device was properly dismissed because the first…
Summary The judgment in PRS v Qatar Airways [2020] EWHC 1872 considers an interesting jurisdiction challenge in the context of international air travel. In December 2019, PRS issued a claim in the UK against Qatar Airways (QA) for a declaration that QA infringed the worldwide performing rights in its musical works, an injunction to prevent…
On 24 April 2020, the Federal Court of Australia handed down a decision in the case Boomerang Investments Pty Ltd v Padgett (Liability) [2020] FCA 535 which concerned the copying of substantial parts of the iconic Australian pop-hit classic ‘Love is in the air’ by the US band, Glass Candy, and by the French airline…
Summary On 30 April 2020, the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) delivered its ruling in the ‘Metall auf Metall’ saga. It decided that the appeals court had erred in finding that reproduction of a two-second sample infringed the reproduction right of a phonogram producer before the coming into force of Directive 2001/29/EC (InfoSoc Directive)….
District court properly dismissed claims by United States pizza chain, finding no infringing acts in the United States. Neither the Copyright Act nor the Lanham Act apply extraterritorially to claims by a United States pizza chain against a pizzeria in Edinburgh, Scotland, which allegedly copied the architectural design, and the look and feel of the…
The Russian citizen’s contacts with Virginia established that he purposefully availed himself of the privilege of conducting business in Virginia. The federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, erred in determining that it lacked personal jurisdiction over a Russian national accused by 12 recording companies of operating two websites that are devoted to “stream ripping” files…
The new Directive for Copyright in the Digital Single Market (“DSM Directive”) was a controversial piece of legislation. Notably, its article 17 has raised many concerns for its impact on fundamental rights, and particularly freedom of expression. In contrast to the mostly declarative or procedural guarantees included in the directive, I argue that an effective…
Blocking injunctions against internet service providers (ISPs) remain one of the most interesting and litigated issues of contemporary copyright law. Though the concept of blocking injunctions per se is firmly established on the basis of CJEU case law (C‑324/09 L’Oréal, C-70/10 Scarlet Extended, C-360/10 Sabam and the seminal C-314/12 UPC Telekabel), blocking injunction jurisprudence in…
Part 1 of this post illustrated the criteria differentiating Article 17 of the EU Directive on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (“DSMCD”) from Article 3 InfoSoc Directive and came to the conclusion that the relationship between the two provisions cannot be explained by a sui generis right, which follows its own…
