On 21 March 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its ruling in case C-10/22 Liberi Autori ed Editori (LEA) v. Jamendo SA. The decision confirms that Independent Management Entities (“IMEs”) can provide their copyright management services in the European Union (EU) alongside Collective Management Organizations (“CMOs”). National legislation in one…
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is about to write yet another chapter in the never-ending, or so it seems, ‘Metall auf Metall’ saga. The facts of the case are all too familiar by now: in 2004, German band Kraftwerk took hip hop producer Moses Pelham to court for copyright infringement after…
The forthcoming article “Creation and Generation Copyright Standards” to be published in NYU JIPEL 2024 (see pre-publication version here) analyses and critiques the different standards for copyright eligibility between expressive works and generative products in the U.S. and China. This blog post focuses on a balanced solution for the emerging problems on the input and…
In July 2023, the Court of Appeal in Wright & Ors v BTC Core & Ors [2023] EWCA Civ 868. overturned the High Court decision in which Mr Justice Mellor found that the Bitcoin File Format (the “BFF”) was not a protectable work in a copyright sense as it did not satisfy the fixation requirement…
For more than seven decades, international law has consistently led countries to embrace culture as a global and cross-border value for humanity. The human right to cultural participation has become a pillar of protecting and empowering individuals and communities. At the EU level, the competence to legislate on cultural matters is mostly left to the…
In Canada, the Federal Government has just announced a $2.4 billion package of measures “to secure Canada’s world-leading AI advantage.” This sum is in addition to the $2 billion of public funds already invested since 2017, when Canada became the first country in the world to launch a national AI strategy. Now, as then, the…
The rise in popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has attracted a great deal of attention from copyright practitioners and aficionados. And why is that? Basically, because an NFT is an encoded digital metadata file of a copy of a work that can be copyright protected. That is, in an NFT there can be an underlying…
In the middle of 2022, three significant AI text-to-image generators were made available to the public: Dall-E 2 (April 2022), Midjourney (July 2022), and Stability Diffusion (August 2022). In addition to raising questions about ownership of outputs, infringement in training, and the future of copyright as a policy tool to encourage creativity, economists are in…
For 25 years, a case has been circling the German Courts like a roller coaster without a final decision. To date, the Federal Court (hereinafter “BGH”) alone has ruled on the matter five times. Now, it is in the hands of the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter “CJEU”)– for the second time….
Welcome to the first trimester of the 2024 roundup of EU copyright law (though with a slight delay)! In this edition, we update you on what has happened between January and March 2024 in EU copyright law. Interestingly enough, in this issue you will find quite a bit of UK policy reports. As our regular…
