In determining the amount of remuneration that an author might obtain for the copyright in his photographs, it was necessary to determine the remuneration that he would have received if the person who violated his rights had entered into an agreement with the author concerning the use of the work. Such a determination should be based on the remuneration rates in the…
The Supreme Court held that it is a matter of fact, not law, whether a work created from fragments of another work is a derivative work (according to Article 2 of the Copyright Act) or another kind of non-independently created work. Therefore this type of issue cannot be debated in an action for determining the…
For quite a long time nothing special has been happening in Polish copyright law. Some court decisions here and there (in all fairness unlikely to be called ground-breaking) and some new legislative initiatives (that will be worthy of presenting if eventually passed). However, yesterday (June 23, 2015) the Polish Constitutional Tribunal issued a decision on…
How the Polish broadcasting law on must-carry and must-offer makes broadcasters choose whether to infringe copyright and licensing contracts or the Polish Broadcasting Act. This post is about a rare mixture of folly and incompetence that is fortunately unlikely to leave any durable traces on the face of copyright law in Europe. However, the utter…
The Polish Ministry of Administration and Digitisation has initiated discussion on the law providing free access to public resources. The Ministry has made available on its webpage a document entitled “Draft Guidelines for the Proposal of the Act on Open Public Resources” and has invited interested parties to comment. Thus a process of “open access…
“The Polish Parliament is of the opinion the draft proposal does not adequately explain why these goals can be “better” realised on the EU level. “ Friday, October 12th 2012 was packed with action in the Polish Parliament (Sejm), because on that day the prime minister subject his government to the vote of confidence and…
The clouds of dust raised by the turbulent discussion about ACTA in Poland seem to be slowly settling and the time has come to make some evaluations. What has happened with ACTA in Poland has surely caught the attention of the world (or at least Europe), but perhaps the scale of it is still underestimated….
One may sometimes get the impression that competition law and consumer protection law can shed new light on any other regulation of a legal system, no matter how well established. An interesting example of this trend has been provided by a recent decision of the Polish Court for the Protection of Competition and Consumers in…
There are many interesting ways one may become a co-author of a copyright work, but in one of its recent decisions the Polish Supreme Court seems to have added a new and quite interesting option. You can namely become a co-author if you delete a few sentences from a scientific article, sentences you believe are…
One of the recent judgements of the Polish Supreme Court provides a good opportunity to review the basic rules applying to copyright contracts in Poland. The Polish copyright law treats copyright contracts in a rather strict and formal way. It specifically states that both assignment and license contracts only cover the co-called fields of exploitation…
