The court held that the applicable law is determined by the lex loci protectionis (Schutzlandprinzip), therefore the question of authorship in Switzerland is determined by the Swiss “creator’s principle”, not the British principle of “work for hire“. Where it is claimed that there has been a parallel creation, inspired by elements in the public domain…
When considering whether a collective management organisation had abused its dominant position by imposing unreasonably high licence fees, it was justifiable to compare its fees with the fees in other markets. These markets should be comparable to the Latvian market in order to achieve the correct outcome. As well as having a similar gross domestic…
The Batmobile, as it appeared in the Batman comic books, television series, and motion picture, was entitled to copyright protection because, as an “automotive character,” it was a sufficiently distinctive element of those works, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has held (DC Comics v. Towle, September 23, 2015, Ikuta, S.). The Ninth…
Robert Snow, author of the 2012 book Slaughter on North LaSalle, did not infringe Carol Sissom’s copyright in her 2006 book The LaSalle Street Murders, because none of the material that Sissom alleged was taken from her book was protectable material under the Copyright Act, but merely restated historical events, the U.S. Court of Appeals…
The court of appeals held that as there was no evidence that the Defendants had gained any profit from a public display of sculptures, they were not liable to pay royalties in respect of the exhibition. However, the defendants were ordered to discontinue sales of products bearing pictures of the copyright sculptures as this activity…
Introduction 9 July 2015 saw the resolution of the umpteenth case involving Spain’s National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) versus a Spanish collecting society (judgment here). On this occasion, the society was SGAE, responsible for managing music copyright. The proceedings examined a complaint made by various composers regarding the measures that the society had…
By Jeremy Blum and Luke Maunder, Bristows A recent decision in the UK Intellectual Property and Enterprise Court (IPEC) provides some helpful guidance on the application of the ‘user principle’ and, more importantly, on the interplay between damages for flagrant infringement under s.97(2) of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) and damages under…
Case I ZR 177/13 of November 17, 2014: Moebelkatalog [Furniture Catalogue] published here. According to a recent ruling of the German Highest Civil Court, the Bundesgerichtshof (“BGH”), the copyright exception for “incidental inclusion of a work or other subject matter in other material” (Article 5 (3) lit. i) Copyright Directive 2001/29) has to be interpreted…
The Polish Supreme Court held that the use of elements of a work of authorship, which are widely known and available (in the public domain), in another work in which those elements were combined in a different way, constitutes an expression of individual creative thought, and cannot therefore be regarded as an infringement of copyright…
In the September 3rd edition of Science∣Business, Julia Reda, German Pirate Party member of the European Parliament (MEP) sitting on the EP Justice Committee, was said to be confident that a mandatory text and data mining (TDM) deal could be introduced for researchers. This should come as music to the ears of the members of…
