Dear readers, Happy new year! Welcome to the fourth (and last) round up of EU copyright law for 2023! In this edition, we update you on what has happened in the last three months of 2024 in EU copyright law. The end of the year was busy for both the courts and the policy makers….

More than two years after the transposition deadline, and with another infringement proceeding under its belt, Bulgaria is one of the last Member States to now implement the CDSM Directive. On the tail end of a political crisis that forced the country into multiple consecutive early general elections and led to a string of short-lived…

Arts. 3 and 4 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSMD) introduced two exceptions for Text and Data Mining (TDM) in EU copyright Law. These two exceptions, despite having different objectives, share several similarities, as scholar analysis has shown. One of these common aspects is the requirement of lawful access. Only if…

In his classic work, ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’, Josef Schumpeter referred to the ‘waves of creative destruction’ to describe how monopoly rents incentivise entrepreneurs to take risk and innovate. The monopoly rent that the entrepreneur derives from his innovation is short-lived, as another wave of creative destruction soon replaces this wave, and gives way to…

On Friday evening, after 38 hours of negotiations, representatives of the European Parliament, EU member states and the European Commission reached a provisional agreement on the proposed AI Act. The deal reached on Friday night now paves the way for the adoption of the AI Act in the first half of 2024, bringing to an…

  THJ Systems Limited & Anor v Daniel Sheridan & Anor [2023] EWCA Civ 1354 concerned many issues but the one of most interest was the correct legal test to consider whether a copyright work is original. One would think this has been well rehearsed in numerous cases already, but the Court of Appeal decision…

In 2019, the European Union (EU) adopted its most important copyright reform in the past 20 years with the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive. This ambitious reform sets a precedent that, given the EU’s status as the world leader in digital regulation and the resultant “Brussels Effect”, may be followed elsewhere. Book…

Copyright protection in machine-generated works is not a new issue for law makers. The traditional concept of human authorship was first challenged with the emergence of photography and this has continued every time a new technology comes about. In the U.S., the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884) extended copyright…