In AGA Rangemaster v UK Innovations ([2024] EWHC 1727 (IPEC)), the UK Intellectual Property Enterprise Court has held that AGA’s trade marks were infringed by a company selling refurbished AGA cookers in a certain manner. AGA also relied on copyright in a design drawing of an AGA control panel and claimed copyright infringement by the…

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…

This blog post contains an edited version of the European Copyright Society’s Opinion on Case C-227/23, Kwantum Nederland and Kwantum België.   The Berne Convention underscores the national treatment of foreign authors, allowing Union states to protect designs through various means. Article 2(7) introduces a material reciprocity test, limiting copyright protection for works of applied…

This article continues the tradition of reporting on the copyright case law of the German Bundesgerichtshof, the highest German civil court for copyright matters (Federal Court of Justice – “BGH”). This article summarises the most important BGH copyright decisions in 2022 as well as selected lower-court case law. Readers may find it useful to consult…

On November 27, 2023, the Beijing Internet Court (BIC) ruled in an infringement lawsuit (Li v. Liu) that an AI-generated image is copyrightable and that a person who prompted the AI-generated image is entitled to the right of authorship under Chinese Copyright Law (see our bilingual version, and the later-released official translation). Plaintiff generated an…

  THJ Systems Limited & Anor v Daniel Sheridan & Anor [2023] EWCA Civ 1354 concerned many issues but the one of most interesting was the correct legal test to consider whether a copyright work is original. One would think this has been well rehearsed in numerous cases already, but the Court of Appeal decision…

The UK High Court has held that Lidl’s rights in the Lidl logo were infringed by Tesco’s Clubcard Price(s) signs ([2023] EWHC 873 (Ch)). Specifically, the court made the following findings. Trade mark infringement – Lidl’s trade mark for the Lidl logo was infringed by Tesco’s Clubcard Price(s) signs, which took unfair advantage of Lidl’s…

Introduction Part 1 analysed an Italian case related to the copyright protection of a “floral fractal” generated via machine-learning (see RAI vs Biancheri). Even more recently, another case dedicated to protection of AI generated visual art has been decided by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Thaler vs Perlmutter, Civil Action…

This is a two-part post summarising the authors’ findings from the report on Copyright Infringement in the Video Game Industry, which was prepared by the authors for the World Intellectual Property Organization. It focusses on the state of the art of the video game industry and the role of IP, in particular copyright, throughout the…

This blog is a continuation of an earlier Kluwer post ‘Getting paid to play? Copyright, contract, and the rewards for UGC’ and is based on the findings of the You Can Play project.   When does a ‘creative work’ become ‘user generated content’ (UGC)? My recent research on video game UGC policies suggests the thin…