Large language models are built on scale. The bigger they are, the better they perform. The appetite for letters of these omnivorous readers is insatiable, so their literary diet must grow steadily if AI is to live up to its promise. If Samuel Johnson, in one of his famous Ramblers of 1751, grumbled about the…
The Advocate-General’s opinion in the Kwantum v. Vitra referral is remarkable in several ways. The case concerns the protection under Dutch copyright of the iconic “DSW” chair designed by American designers Charles and Ray Eames. Kwantum, a popular low-budget furniture store chain, sold copies of the chair without rightholder Vitra’s permission. Before the Dutch courts…
In its jugment of 30 April 2024 (C-470/21), the Court of Justice of the European Union answered three questions referred by the French Administrative Supreme Court (‘Conseil d’Etat’), that can be summed up as follows: must Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58 on privacy and electronic communications be interpreted as precluding national legislation which authorises the…
The effect of rapid development of generative AI on copyright law continues to challenge the lawmakers and courts. Whilst the UK High Court is yet to reach its decision on liability for copyright infringement in the AI training data in Getty Images v Stability AI, the Chinese case of Ultraman became the first to recognise…
As reported in earlier posts on this blog, in a 2022 study, I examined the national implementations in the 11 Member States that had at that time transposed Article 15 (the press publishers’ right) and Article 17 (the special copyright liability regime for “online content-sharing services providers” (OCSSPs)) of the EU’s Copyright in the Digital…
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…
Generative AI continues to make advances. And whilst its capabilities can be overhyped, there is undoubtably a growing perception that AI will soon be capable of effectively and infinitely ‘replacing’ the human performers on whose performances it is trained. Whether AI will ever fully achieve this goal in a cost-effective manner, or if the market…
Rights Retention Strategy Plan S is innovative, ambitious and unsurprisingly complex. Rights retention represents just a part of Plan S. Rights retention was developed as a strategy for compliance with the funder’s requirements by retaining some of the economic rights granted by copyright. It was not intended to be a strategy for simply retaining rights…
Introduction This two-part blog post is aiming to explain what Rights Retention is and how it works in practice. In the first part, I’ll explain the forces at play in the publishing industry, why copyright ownership in academia is so important and how the publishing process works. These are technicalities that must be explained beforehand…
The Digital Services Act (DSA) transparency database, while proving to be rather useless for misinformation or hate speech researchers, is very enlightening on copyright moderation. Platform governance researchers have long suspected that YouTube is the most heavily moderated platform on copyright issues, and we now have concrete proof of this. YouTube, to date, according to…
