In Europe, the existence of and rights conferred by copyright in software is determined by Directive 2009/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2009 on the legal protection of computer programs (which replaced Directive 91/250/EEC). The directive aims to harmonise the law in this area and deal with issues raised by the need for interoperability.
How did we get here? Case C-159/23 Sony Computer Entertainment Europe revolves around the scope of protection of computer programs under the 2009 Software Directive. The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) will respond to two preliminary questions posed by the German Supreme Court. The detailed background of the case was discussed in a…
Welcome to the second trimester of the 2024 roundup of EU copyright law right in time before the (hopefully) quiet summer period starts. In this edition, we update you on what has happened between March and June 2024 in EU copyright law. As our regular readers know, this roundup series includes Court of Justice (CJEU)…
The testimony was properly excluded—and without it, the software company could not prevail on its copyright claims. A Detroit federal court correctly found that a software designer moved too late to introduce expert testimony supporting the copyrightability of its source code, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has held. The court, in…
In the generative AI era, there is a proliferation of open source claims (i.e. operators that claim to release AI models sufficiently open to be part of the open source or open innovation movement, as opposed to closed-source model), such as open source and open access foundation models (e.g. Google BERT, Meta LLaMA Large Language…
A loophole in copyright protection? The 2009 directive on the legal protection of computer programs (the Software Directive) grants copyright protection to all forms of expression of computer programs. Its Article 4(1) mentions three exclusive rights. The first is the reproduction right, which covers not only permanent copies but also temporary copies loaded into the volatile…
The digital codes were created for functional purposes and were put together under purely mechanical rules. The digital codes sent by a pyrotechnics control system were not entitled to protection under the Copyright Act because they were no more than “an inevitable system dictated by the logic” of the setup, the U.S. Court of Appeals…
The buzz around AI-generated outputs seems to never stop. While the field is rich on exaggerated claims, there are certain domains that have seen a genuine revolution fueled by AI. One such field is journalism. In the past years, sophisticated AI algorithms have become a meaningful assistant in the European news industry. Going beyond mere…
European and international policymakers have raised how artificial intelligence (AI) interacts with intellectual property (IP) law on several occasions. Nonetheless, before any policy and law-making endeavour can be undertaken, a fitness test of the existing IP framework is indispensable. Recent discussions have focused on AI-aided and AI-generated output, concentrating on whether an AI system can…
Parts 1 and 2 of this post (originally published in “Auteurs & Media”) summarising case law of the German Bundesgerichtshof from 2015 to 2019 are available here and here, and part 4 will be published on the blog shortly. IV. Related rights In addition to rights of the author, German copyright law also recognises…
The decade-long titanic battle between Oracle and Google over whether copyright law forbids unlicensed reimplementations of parts of the Java Application Program Interface (API) in a smartphone platform is finally over. In a blockbuster opinion for a 6-2 majority for the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer decisively supported Google’s fair use defense. The biggest…
