Performers have a right to equitable remuneration for the public performance and broadcast of their recordings.
2021 saw a very active German Bundesgerichtshof (“BGH” – Federal Supreme Court) in the area of copyright law. This article covers the most relevant copyright law decisions of the BGH from that year. Part I addressed decisions in the areas of scope of protection, exploitation rights, exceptions and limitations, and copyright contract law. Part II…
The increasing costs of publication under the Gold Open Access model and “Big Deals” The European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) has for many years supported the move away from proprietary models of scientific publishing towards Open Access (OA).[1] OA publication of publicly funded scientific research bears the triple promise of…
The Conseil d’Etat, the French administrative Supreme Court, handed down an important ruling on 15 November 2022 which annuls Order no. 2021-580 of 12 May 2021 (‘2021 Order’) of the French Government that implements articles 2(6) and 17 to 23 of the EU Directive 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market…
According to Article 16 EU DSM Directive 2019/790 (“DSM Directive”), a “publisher” may have a claim to a share of the author’s statutory remuneration claims – such as fair compensation for private copies – if the author has granted the “publisher” a right in his work. But who is this “publisher”? After the adoption of…
Judgment nº208/2021 of Madrid Commercial Court nº16 (December 20th, 2021) Context and facts This case concerns a dispute between the collecting management organisation CEDRO[1] and GOOGLE DISCOVER for non-payment of fair compensation for the limitation established in article 32.2 (now abrogated by the implementation of the CDSM Directive[2]) of the Spanish Copyright Act (SCA) between…
In the recent case of Estonian Performers Union (EEL) v vs. MTÜ Urban Style, the Estonian Supreme Court examined the circumstances that should be taken into account in determining the amount of the equitable remuneration that phonogram producers and performers are entitled to claim if a phonogram published for commercial purposes or a reproduction thereof…
Introduction When we launched the Copyright Evidence Portal, our ambition was no less than to create a catalogue of all existing empirical studies about copyright. This ambition, and the resulting huge body of work (over 850 studies), inspired us to think about new ways to interpret this empirical literature, and to offer a state-of-the-art overview…
In 2015, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) set out to conduct empirical research on the impact of copyright exceptions. We felt that there was a shortage of papers demonstrating the benefits of exceptions for users of protected works. We soon realized that information about the changes to copyright law over time…
Parts 1 to 3 of this post (originally published in “Auteurs & Media”) summarising case law of the German Bundesgerichtshof from 2015 to 2019 are available here, here and here. VII. Copyright contract law (Sections 31 et seqq. UrhG) Right of remuneration (Sections 32 et seqq. UrhG) German copyright law stipulates…
On 21st October 2021, Facebook announced that it has reached an agreement with APIG, an association of French press publishers, committing itself to the payment of licensing fees pursuant to the press publishers’ right introduced by the 2019 Copyright Directive. According to Facebook’s press release, the agreement “means that people on Facebook will be able…
