Recent developments on portability On November 28th 2016 the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright Reform established by the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament issued a Report with possible amendments to the European Commission’s draft Proposal for a Regulation on ensuring the cross-border portability of online content services in the…
The Spanish Supreme Court has annulled some of the rules regulating the system of financing fair compensation for private copying through the General State Budget on the grounds that they are incompatible with EU law. The system that had been in place up until now was analysed by the CJEU through a number of questions…
As discussed in this blog post, the impact which Brexit has on the UK’s copyright regime will largely depend on the exact form that Brexit takes. Whilst copyright has remained far less harmonised across EU member states than other IP rights, one aspect of UK law which has been affected by the EU is the…
Following a referendum on 23 June 2016, 51.9% of UK voters said “yes” to Brexit. British Prime Minister Theresa May revealed earlier this month that Article 50 TEU will be triggered by March 2017, marking the beginning of the formal withdrawal process. It is hard to predict the impact of Brexit on the current copyright…
A new French Law provides that search engines using thumbnails will have to pay royalties via a compulsory collective management for the reproduction of photographs and images. The French Act No. 2016-925 of 7 July 2016 on freedom of creation, architecture and cultural heritage contains several provisions on copyright that modify the intellectual property Code…
As has by now been extensively reported, on 14th September the European Commission released its new copyright reform package. Prominent within this is its proposal for a new Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The proposal contains an array of controversial offerings, but from the perspective of this intermediary liability blogger, the most…
On 8 September 2016, AG Wahl presented his Opinion regarding the nature of the competence of the EU to conclude the Marrakesh Treaty (Opinion procedure 3/15). In the AG’s view, [*spoiler alert*] the EU is exclusively competent on this matter – a conclusion that much delighted this blogger and that she had already ventured in…
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…
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…
