On 24 May 2011, the European Commission announced a proposal for a directive on ‘certain permitted uses of orphan works’. This title perfectly conveys the scope of the proposal. Rather than adopting a generic approach to deal with the problem of orphan works, the Commission comes up with a set of measures designed for specific…
On the 24th and 25th of May, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy convened a forum on the future of the Internet, the e-G8 Forum, two days before the Meeting of the leaders of the G-8. This forum was intended to prepare the G-8 communiqué on the measures that Governments should adopt to protect children online,…
The saga of copyright protection of industrial design works continues. Historically, Italian courts had been very reluctant to recognize copyright protection to industrial design works due to a provision (now abrogated) contained in the Copyright Law that clearly excluded copyrightability of creative works whereas the artistic value of the work was not separable from the…
As reported by the Dutch commentator Lucie Guibault in her recent Blogpost the Dutch government (in the person of the secretary of state, Fred Teeven) plans to restrict the private copying limitation. Downloads from “obviously illegal sources” shall be declared unlawful. In Germany such a rule exists already, implemented in the course of the first…
BELGIUM – In a case of SABAM (the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers) versus a counterfeits dealer, the Belgian Supreme Courts finds that in litigations against copyright infringers, collecting societies can prove the existence of management contracts pertaining to some works by solely producing the official repertoire listing that they mandatorily have to…
DENMARK – An end user of the Direct Connect file sharing network was found liable for copyright infringements. However, the Supreme Court did not agree with the right holders (respondents) that the extent of the infringements was sufficiently documented and overturned the evidence (a list of files) provided by right holders. Also, the Supreme Court…
On 3 May 2011, the Paris Court of Appeal dismissed the claims of copyright infringement brought by the Syndicat National de l’Edition Phonographique (SNEP- trade association of the French recording industry) against Google. Since 2008, the search engine is proposing a service, Google Suggest, which guesses and suggests a list of keywords in real time…
On 2 May 2011 the Ministry of Culture in Portugal made public a law proposal concerning the regulation of private copying levies (the English version of which is unfortunately not available). The law currently in force dates from 2004 and had in turn made some changes to the original law, dated from 1998. There have…
The commented decision may at first glance appear to be of limited importance only, but after closer examination it contains two interesting points of more general significance. The basic facts are the following: the plaintiff, a collecting society ZAIKS, brought a claim against two companies demanding payment for selling copies of the film “Rejs” (“Cruise”),…
[By Luke McDonagh) The Irish Times has today reported that the copyright in the Irish national anthem is due to expire next year. When the copyright in “A Soldier’s Song”, or as it is known in its Irish language version, “Amhrán na bhFiann”, expires at the end of 2012, the debate is expected to reopen…
