As succinctly noted by Susan Bischoff in a prior post, the ongoing legal saga surrounding the ‘Metall auf Metall’ case continues to yield legal insights. Presently, a new reference from the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) asks the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for vital interpretive guidance concerning the parody exception…

The US class action against Google Bard (J.L. v. Alphabet Inc, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-03440) In a recent post we analysed a class action filed in the US against Open AI for unauthorized use of copyright works for training of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT (here) (“Generative…

Welcome to the third trimester of the 2023 round up of EU copyright law! In this edition, we update you on what has happened between July and September 2023 in EU copyright law. The autumn has started with full speed – the courts and the policy makes have been very active. This round up series…

The UK government has recently announced its plans to introduce a code of practice on copyright and artificial intelligence (AI). The guidance and all supporting documents can be found here. This goes in line with the government’s ten-year National AI Strategy, for the UK to remain a global AI superpower and for AI companies to…

The belated Portuguese transposition of the CDSM Directive was finally published in the Portuguese Official Journal (Diário da República) on the 19th of June 2023. The approved Decree-Law 47/2023 to a large extent corresponds to a legislative project (Project 52/XV), which, in turn, was a variation of a previous project (Project 114/XIV) that failed due…

The members of the European Copyright Society (ECS) have recently sent a letter to Mr. Thierry Breton (Commissioner for Internal Market, European Commission) outlining their view of what should be the priorities for a future agenda in the field of copyright law. The letter is available here and its contents are reproduced below.   The…

The booming industry of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is facing its first regulatory attempt in China. On April 11th, the Cyberspace Administration of China released a draft of the Regulation for Generative Artificial Intelligence Services (the ‘draft Regulation’) for public consultation, which includes 21 articles detailing the proposed regulatory framework for the generative AI industry….

As testified by collections such as those of Trinity College’s Old Library, copying and illustrating manuscripts by hand was such a well-developed practice among members of mediaeval religious orders in Ireland that two Christian saints – Columba and Finnian – ended up having the first recorded copyright dispute in the Western world’s history. The most…

TLDR   Generative AI is one of the hot topics in copyright law today. In the EU, a crucial legal issue is whether using in-copyright works to train generative AI models is copyright infringement or falls under existing text and data mining (TDM) exceptions in the Copyright in Digital Single Market (CDSM) Directive. In particular,…

Welcome to the first trimester of the 2023 round up of EU copyright law! In this edition, we report on an AG Opinion that came out late in 2022 and update you on what has happened in the first trimester of 2023 in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court…