The threshold of originality is a concept in copyright law that is used to assess whether a particular work can be protected by copyright. It is used to distinguish works that are sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection from those that are not.
In Equisafety Ltd v Woof Wear Ltd (Equisaftey) Ian Karat sitting as a Judge in the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) rejected the Claimant’s copyright infringement claim in respect of various equestrian garments because the garments did not qualify as works of artistic craftsmanship under s.4 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). …
Just seven weeks after the release of the AG’s Opinion the Kwantum v. Vitra case was decided by the European Court. For Dutch background and early criticism, see my earlier blog. The main question asked to the Court was whether a Member State may unilaterally apply the Berne Convention’s rule of material reciprocity (Article 2(7)…
Code as a literary work Following lengthy discussion in the 1970s and 1980s, by 1991 in the EU and 1994 at the WTO level, the legal status of computer programs was a settled matter: software was to be treated under copyright as a literary work. Source code and object code are protected by copyright. As…
Earlier this year, the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) issued an order (Cass., ord. no.11413/2024) in a case concerning the protection by copyright of a lamp design. Part I of this post outlined the decisions issued as the case made its way through the Italian court system. Part II will now turn to the…
Generative AI (GenAI) is promising to revolutionise higher education. Whether it concerns legal scholars using ChatGPT to write their essays, computer science majors relying on GitHub Copilot to generate programming code, or art students turning to Midjourney to create visual artistry: the relevant AI tools to assist with educational assignments are readily available online. The…
The AI Law Proposal: general context and subject matter On 23 April 2024, the Italian government published the text of a draft law introducing regulatory provisions concerning the use of Artificial Intelligence systems to the Italian legal system (“AI Law Proposal”) (here). The text has been approved by the Council of Ministers and…
In July 2023, the Court of Appeal in Wright & Ors v BTC Core & Ors [2023] EWCA Civ 868. overturned the High Court decision in which Mr Justice Mellor found that the Bitcoin File Format (the “BFF”) was not a protectable work in a copyright sense as it did not satisfy the fixation requirement…
The rise in popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has attracted a great deal of attention from copyright practitioners and aficionados. And why is that? Basically, because an NFT is an encoded digital metadata file of a copy of a work that can be copyright protected. That is, in an NFT there can be an underlying…
On 19 March 2024, the Court of Appeal handed down its decision on the appeal in the Lidl v Tesco case ([2024] EWCA Civ 262), holding as follows. First instance (High Court) decision Court of Appeal ruling Copyright infringement Overturned (appeal allowed) Trade mark infringement Upheld (appeal dismissed) Passing off Upheld (appeal dismissed) Trade…
The Austrian Supreme Court (hereinafter: “ASC”) ruled on 19th of December 2023 (4 Ob 112/23h) in a case concerning the 2019 film “Yesterday”. The Plaintiff alleged that the film infringed its copyright in a short screenplay idea published in 2011. The First Defendant distributes the film “Yesterday” to Austrian cinemas. The Second Defendant is responsible…
