Exceptions and Limitations to copyright are provisions which allow for works protected by copyright to be used in specific situations without a licence from the copyright owner. There are numerous limitations and exceptions found in copyright legislation including, for example, the fair use exception, exceptions for libraries, archives and educational institutions, and the back-up copy exception.
In Greek mythology, the saga of Sisyphus personifies relentless and never-ending toil – condemned by the gods to an eternity of pushing a massive boulder up a steep hill, only to watch it roll back down again as he nears the summit. With 24 years of legal proceedings and a dozen court rulings behind them,…
With the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) restarting its activities after the vacation break, we look back to one of the late-summer judgement, standing out for its technical, yet impactful character. In Case C-426/21, the CJEU looked into the complicated relationship between copyright law and online television services. The focus of the case…
Introduction The current international legal framework for text and data mining (TDM) is highly disharmonized, showing a variety of approaches that span from completely unregulated to partially and fully regulated. Furthermore, regulation is not uniform, and it addresses relevant stakeholders (creative and content industries, tech firms, users, research, and the public sector) in various ways….
Context Copyright can be challenging for cultural institutions (or “GLAM“ for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) when pursuing digitization and dissemination activities, as copyright governs whether a given work can be used and if so, how (as shown in recent studies for museums, archives or libraries). These challenges lead to a need to support legislative…
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…
“No artist starts from scratch in a vacuum”. This finding of the Berlin Regional Court seems obvious. But copyright law faces daunting challenges when copyrighted material not only inspires a creative process, but becomes the very object of it. From Italian opera to Andy Warhol to memes – incorporating and referencing other works has always…
The H2020 project reCreating Europe performed an unprecedented mapping of EU and Member States’ sources on copyright flexibilities. Part I of this blog post explained the mapping of EU sources and their conclusions. Part II deals with the comparative analysis of the law of all 27 Member States, with related comparative findings. The mapping of…
From January 2020 to July 2022, the H2020 project reCreating Europe and its teams at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa) and the University of Szeged performed an unprecedented mapping of EU and Member States’ sources on copyright flexibilities, focusing both on public regulatory sources (statutes, court decisions, governmental policies and practices) and on private ordering tools,…
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,…
