United Kingdom

Case Law, Legislative process, United Kingdom

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The Secretary of State’s decision to introduce section 28B of the CDPA 1988, which created an exception to copyright for personal private use without a mechanism for compensating rightholders, was found to be unlawful. The Secretary of State had introduced the provision on the basis that any harm caused to rightholders would be zero or…

Case Law, Damages, Infringement, Remedies, United Kingdom

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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…

Collective management, European Union, Legislative process, United Kingdom

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By Jeremy Blum and Jade McIntyre, Bristows The EU Directive on the collective management of copyright and multi-territorial licensing of online music (“the Directive”), published on 26 February 2014, entered into force on 10 April 2014 and must be transposed into national law by 10 April 2016. The policy underpinning the Directive is part of…

Case Law, Legislative process, Private copying, Remedies, United Kingdom

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We reported here last month that the private copying exception, which took effect on 1 October 2014 as s.28B of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, was declared unlawful by the High Court. The court found that the evidence relied on by the government in order to introduce the exception without also providing a means…

Case Law, Legislative process, Private copying, Remedies, United Kingdom

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In October 2014 the government introduced a series of changes to the UK’s copyright regime. One change, key to the objective of making copyright law better suited to the digital age, was the introduction of a private copying exception. That exception is now in jeopardy following a successful challenge by the music industry. For the…

Case Law, Communication (right of), Enforcement, Infringement, Remedies, United Kingdom

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This case concerned blocking orders pursuant to s97A of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). The Court found that there was copyright infringement by both UK users and operators of file-sharing websites, insofar as there was communication of copyright works, the communication was to the public, and the act of communication took place in the UK.  This…

Case Law, Enforcement, Infringement, United Kingdom

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The claimants, all members of the Motion Picture Association of America holding copyright in a large number of films and TV programmes, were granted a blocking order preventing the use of Popcorn Time, an open source streaming application which used the BitTorrent protocol to download the claimants’ copyright content. A full summary of this case…

Case Law, Infringement, Originality, United Kingdom

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A claim for infringement of copyright and design rights failed. There was no good reason to reject evidence that the fabric in question was created without sight of the claimant’s fabric; the similarities between the designs were not sufficient to infer that there had been subconscious copying. A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP…

Case Law, Communication (right of), Digital Single Market, Enforcement, Infringement, Remedies, Software, United Kingdom

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Another blocking order in the UK, however, this time there was some complexity about the actual acts of infringement. In Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation & Ors v Sky UK Ltd & Ors, the High Court considered the circumstances in which website blocking orders should be granted against websites facilitating the use of a “sophisticated…

Case Law, CJEU, European Union, Infringement, United Kingdom

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In a decision that could have serious implications for websites providing real time streaming of free to air broadcasts, the English Court of Appeal has recently handed down its Judgment in the case of ITV Broadcasting Limited and others v TV Catchup Limited and others [2015] EWCA Civ 204.  The outcome is that the action…