An eight-second piece of the song “Fish Sticks n’ Tater Tots” was transformative and reasonably related to the documentary’s purpose of commenting on the resurgence of burlesque dancing. A documentary film’s incorporation of an eight-second excerpt of the children’s song “Fish Sticks n’ Tater Tots” was a noninfringing fair use, the U.S. Court of Appeals…

Article 17 Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (“DSM Directive”) is currently being implemented into national law in the EU Member States. This has caused extensive debates on the national level comparable to the debate that took place when Art. 17 DSM Directive was introduced in 2019. But…

In the midst of the economic and social paralysis arising from the COVID 19 pandemic, the tireless discipline of law has prevailed as always, if anything with increased activity. The Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances (BTAP, hereinafter the “Treaty”) came into force on 28 April 2020 in the first thirty contracting parties (the minimum number…

On 3 June 2021, the CJEU handed down its judgment in CV-Online Latvia v Melons (with Ilešič as a reporting judge), a case involving Melons’ infringement of CV-Online Latvia’s database of job advertisements arguably protected by the sui generis right. The facts of the case are expertly described by Tatiana Synodinou in her comment on the…

To mark the deadline for the national implementation of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD) and present the mid-term results of its cross-disciplinary and transnational research, the Horizon 2020 project reCreating Europe is organising the web conference “The implementation of the CDSM Directive: snapshots into the future of EU copyright law”,…

In 2019, Artem Stoliarov, a Russian DJ whose stage name is Arty, filed a lawsuit before the US District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that Marshmello’s song ‘Happier’ copied the synthesizer melody from his 2014 remix of OneRepublic’s ‘I Lived’ (OneRepublic is an American pop rock band). Marshmello, an American electronic music…

On June 7th, two years after its adoption, the deadline for implementing the DSM Directive finally expired. While academics and stakeholders have been critically dissecting its controversial provisions on platform liability, news aggregation and text & data mining, the Directive’s Chapter 3 (‘Fair remuneration in exploitation contracts of authors and performers’) has gone almost unnoticed,…

Introduction The long-awaited European Commission Guidance on art. 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSMD) was finally published on 4 June 2021, a mere working day before the transposition deadline of 7 June.  Since then, there have already been several pieces published weighing in on the Guidance’s merits and shortcomings (mostly…

On 4 June 202, the European Commission published its guidance on Article 17 of Directive 790/2019 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM Directive). The guidance drew attention mainly because the Commission shifted from a position that rejected ex-ante blocking of content to a permissive take towards ex-ante blocking beyond manifestly illegal content (see…

In this case, the court held that according to the Facebook Terms of Service it is permissible to post copyright protected content on a Facebook timeline if this content has been already published on Facebook. The court also emphasised that the defendant would have been entitled to publish the post under Section 19 4) of…