Introduction The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC), part of the English High Court, has ruled that copyright subsists in the character of Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter and that a character can be protected as a literary work under the UK’s closed list of copyright works ([2022] EWHC 1379 IPEC). That copyright was found to have…
Welcome to the second trimester of the 2022 round up of EU copyright law! We started this rubric back in 2021. In this series, we update readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. You…
This year we have seen an influx of educational events dedicated to everything digital. In particular, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), crypto and metaverse have dominated our infospace. June was no exception. Last Wednesday, Fide (a legal-economic think-tank) held the latest in their series of Global Digital Encounters (GDE) – an online panel discussion focusing on the…
Last month, the Internal Market Committee of the European Parliament endorsed the provisional agreement previously reached with EU governments on the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA, together with its sister proposal on the Digital Markets Act (DMA), sets standards for a safer and more open digital space for users and a level playing field…
Introduction On 23 February 2022, the European Commission (EC) published a Proposal for a ‘Regulation on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data (Data Act)’. This legal instrument will horizontally set rules applicable to the relationship between manufacturers and users of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The Data Act Proposal assigns users…
Use of the author’s quote on a high school Twitter account was educational rather than commercial because it clearly was intended to inspire high school athletes, and the school obtained no profit from its use. In a case in which an author sued a public school district for using a passage from his book on…
Users are increasingly prolonging the lifespan and value of a video game past its initial release date through user-generated content (UGC). The little-understood phenomenon of ‘watching other people play games’ is now a commonplace fact of life online. This phenomenon is responsible for creating game influencers, and those game influencers have also in turn created…
The judgement of the European Court of Justice in case C-401/19 has hardly laid to rest the debates over the use of upload filters in automated copyright enforcement. On the contrary, by declaring Article 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market compatible with the Charter, while requiring Member States to ensure…
This is the second installment of a reflection on the topic of content moderation and bias mitigation measures in copyright law. The first part of this post briefly discussed the concept of bias and examined the role of property rights in data and factual information, with a focus on copyright. This second part explores the…
Introduction This two-part blog post offers a reflection on the topic of content moderation and bias mitigation measures in copyright law. It explores the possible links between conditional data access regimes and content moderation performed through data-intensive technologies such as fingerprinting and, within the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) algorithms. More specifically,…
