A provider that offers free unprotected Wi-Fi should not be held responsible when their users use the service to infringe copyright. This is according to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the long-running German case of Tobias McFadden v Sony Music Entertainment Germany GmbH (C-484/14). The circumstances of the case were…
On March 23 the European Commission launched a public consultation on both the role of publishers in the copyright value chain and the ‘panorama exception’. The intent was to gather views on several issues: first, whether publishers of newspapers, magazines, books and scientific journals are facing problems in the digital environment as a result of…
The Labour Chamber of the French Supreme Court has reaffirmed that under Article L.111-1 paragraph 3 of the French Intellectual Property Code (‘IPC’), a labour agreement entered into with the author of a work shall in no way derogate from the general rule, under which the author is the first creator. Therefore, in default of…
Recently, the Commission published a draft of the Commission’s impact assessment “on the modernisation of EU copyright rules” and a draft for a new directive “on copyright in the Digital Single Market” were leaked. Yesterday, the Commission launched the long-awaited proposal for this directive, which includes an exception for reproductions made by research organisations to…
Earlier this year, the Commission launched a public consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain. The consultation sought to gather views on a number of issues, namely the impact of granting an EU neighbouring right to publishers and whether the need for EU intervention is different in the press sector vis-à-vis…
In this case, brought by a Latvian collective management organisation (AKKA/LAA) against the Latvian Government, the European Court of Human Rights held as follows: 1. The protection of intellectual property rights, including the protection of copyright and the economic interests deriving from it, falls within the scope of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 of…
The Conseil d’Etat, the French administrative Supreme Court, ordered the French Prime Minister to take regulatory measures to indemnify the ISPs (Internet service providers) for the costs incurred when the HADOPI Commission requires them to provide information relating to internet users who have or are likely to have infringed copyright law. A full summary of…
The legal issues surrounding the publication of Internet search results is a topic of great interest for copyright experts. In this interview, originally published in German in the journal Neue Juristische Wochenschrift, and reproduced here with the kind permission of Verlag C.H. Beck, Professor Jan Bernd Nordemann discusses a recent German case on this topic….
The federal district court in Chicago incorrectly required the painter of a portrait of the leader of the Nation of Islam to prove unauthorized copying, instead of merely copying, for purposes of its copyright infringement claim against the publisher of a newspaper for selling unauthorized copies of his work “Minister Farrakhan Painting,” the U.S. Court…
A Kansas federal court did not err in dismissing fish illustrator Joseph Tomelleri’s copyright infringement suit against MEDL Mobile and Jason Siniscalchi, the developers and marketers of a fishing app called FishID, because Tomelleri failed to show that his injuries arose from MEDL’s Kansas activities, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver has determined. Furthermore,…
