Because the artists who would form part of the class had entered into licensing agreements with varying terms, individual issues would prevail over common questions. A district court improperly certified a class of songwriters and artists whose allegedly unlicensed performances can be downloaded and listened to from a popular music memorabilia website, the U.S. Court…
Last week the European Commission published its proposal for a Data Act. The proposal is the second major element of the European Data Strategy presented in 2020 and complements the Data Governance Act that is expected to be formally adopted this spring. As expected, the proposed Data Act introduces rules strengthening user access and portability…
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…
Readers of this blog will be familiar with the English High Court’s strong track record in issuing injunctions to compel internet service providers (“ISPs”) to block access to copyright-infringing websites. In the latest such order issued by the High Court (on 3 February 2022), one of the target websites was a cyberlocker hosting movies and…
At the time that Directive 2019/790/EU (DSM Directive) was being developed, much media attention was focussed, over a period of many months, on the liability of online content sharing service providers for content uploaded by their users. Initially in Art. 13 and ultimately in Art. 17 of the DSM Directive, the Directive stipulates that online…
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…
Fashion is an industry largely led by seasonal trends. Status-conferring new designs are being launched bi-annually, during the Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer fashion shows, to meet the needs of our capitalistic society. Even though fashion designs are often inspired by the prior art, seasonal trends precondition innovation – new design themes that make the highly desirable…
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…
Google prevails in what it has called “the copyright case of the decade.” Google LLC’s copying of approximately 11,000 lines of code from the Java SE application programming interface to create the Android mobile operating system was a fair use of that material as a matter of law and did not support copyright infringement by…
As a matter of principle, the exercise of the exclusive rights under copyright is the author’s individual prerogative: it is the author who decides whether they wish to authorize the reproduction or communication to the public of their works (the same goes for the performer, the producers, the broadcaster or the news publisher). Exceptionally, copyright…
