The right of making available to the public is part of the right of communication to the public set out in Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29/EC (the Copyright Directive or Infosoc Directive), which requires that EU member states must provide authors with the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit any communication to the public of their works by wire or wireless means, including the making available to the public of their works in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.
“The BGH thus insinuates that framing may be a yet “unnamed right of exploitation” within the scope of Art. 15(2) Copyright Act.” On 16th May 2013 the first Senate of the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH), delivered its judgment in another case revolving around the issue of hyperlinking or framing. If one had hoped…
“No need to wait for the ECJ, the Court replied.” In Belgium, besides being a tort from a civil law perspective, a copyright infringement can also be a criminal offence, on the condition that it is done “with malicious or fraudulent intent”. When copyright infringements are committed by unknown perpetrators (which is quite common on…
The European Copyright Society, a group of prominent European scholars, today issued an opinion on the Svensson case (Case C-466/12), which is currently before the European Court of Justice. The case, which was referred to the Court by the Swedish Court of Appeal (Svea hovrätt) on 18 October 2012, raises the important question whether setting…
Playing Catch 22 with cultural heritage is quite simple: since cultural heritage institutions hardly ever are in a position to digitize their collection because of a lack of financial resources, they obtain funding on the basis of public/private partnerships. Chances are that in return for the financial support needed for digitization, the private party will…
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…
“When providing healthcare in healthcare facilities, there is no obligation to pay remuneration for communication to the public of copyright works. But, is a hotel room where occasionally health treatment is performed a healthcare facility?” On 24 July 2012, Krajský soud v Plzni (Czech Republic) lodged a reference for preliminary ruling with the CJEU in…
The French Supreme Court (“Cour de Cassation”) has upheld, in a ruling of 25 September 2012, a judgment of the Court of Appeal of Paris condemning Radioblog and its managing directors to the payment of damages amounting to over €1 million, in addition to a suspended prison sentence of nine months and a €10,000 fine….
“According to the current formulation of the draft law, material quoted by humans for commentary and analysis, as opposed to that automatically selected by a computer, may be copied freely.” The link wars have once again broken out in Europe. In August, the German cabinet gave its backing to a draft law allowing news publishers…
On January 5, 2011, representatives of ACAPOR (a Portuguese association representing commercial retailers of cultural and entertainment works), wearing t-shirts with the slogans “piracy is illegal” and “1000 complaints per month”, filed a petition with the Prosecutor General’s Office (“PGO”) giving notice of the practice of 1000 acts of alleged usurpation of authors’ rights via…
The “Arco” lamp is protected by copyright. But Italy is still struggling with the moratorium of the copyright protection of industrial design. With a 56-pages decision of the District Court of Milan published on 12 September 2012 and made available last week, the “Arco” lamp case, started as far back as 2006, has finally come…
