The ownership of copyright in works is determined by law and may depend on the circumstances under which the work was created. In many cases the author of the work will be the first owner but, for example, some national laws provide that where such works are made by employees, the employer is the first owner of the copyright. Ownership of copyright can be transferred.
The Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with Kluwer Law International, publisher of the Information Law Series, has launched an online archive of older book volumes published in the series. The Information Law Series, which was established in 1991, is the world’s first and foremost academic book series in…
Rights Retention Strategy Plan S is innovative, ambitious and unsurprisingly complex. Rights retention represents just a part of Plan S. Rights retention was developed as a strategy for compliance with the funder’s requirements by retaining some of the economic rights granted by copyright. It was not intended to be a strategy for simply retaining rights…
Introduction This two-part blog post is aiming to explain what Rights Retention is and how it works in practice. In the first part, I’ll explain the forces at play in the publishing industry, why copyright ownership in academia is so important and how the publishing process works. These are technicalities that must be explained beforehand…
Case arises out of dispute over the estate of noted evangelical minister Dr. Lester Sumrall. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago has affirmed the dismissal of claims for copyright ownership brought by a trust asserting the rights of a son of the late evangelical pastor Dr. Lester Sumrall, finding those claims were barred…
Although large, general purpose AI (GPAI) or “foundation” models and their generative products have been around for several years, it was ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 which captured the public and media’s imagination as well as large amounts of venture capital funding. Since then, large models generating not just text and image but also video,…
In February 2024, the Court of Appeal in New Zealand (the Court) issued a judgment on a long-running matter between a separating couple looking to sort out their property. The appellant, Ms Alalääkkölä, was an artist who had created copyrighted works throughout her career. Her former spouse, Mr Palmer, argued that the copyright in those…
Summary In the case of Wright & Ors v BTC Core & Ors [2023] EWHC 222 the High Court was faced with a technical copyright question about whether literary copyright can subsist in the file format used for the Bitcoin System (the “Bitcoin File Format”). Justice Mellor concluded that copyright could not subsist in the…
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are altering society’s notion of digital ‘ownership’ and redefining the common perspective on distribution of original works to consumers by introducing scarcity to the digital realm. Although frequently misconstrued, this technology represents an exceptional advancement that can yield enormous revenue streams for both creators and consumers by altering the digital representation of…
In late 2022, the Court of Venice issued an interesting order restraining the use of the image of a well-known piece of Renaissance art by Leonardo da Vinci: the Study of the Proportions of the Human Body in the Manner of Vitruvius, also known as the Vitruvian Man.[1] The artwork is held by the Italian…
It is a common practice to make copies of deteriorating or far away cultural heritage. As of 2022, it is not even a new idea to use digital methods to copy heritage, considering that the mass digitisation of cultural heritage, especially books, started more than two decades ago. But we should also recognise the current…
