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…

The European Commission has published its long overdue guidance on the application of art. 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD), a mere three days before the implementation deadline. The final version of the guidance makes it clear that the Commission has abandoned the position it held before the CJEU…

In Part 1 of this blog post, we introduced the core mechanism of ex-ante protection against the blocking of legal uploads in Germany’s implementation of art. 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD). In Part 2, we examine other elements of the German implementation bill, the “Act on the Copyright…

On 28 May the German Bundesrat approved the law transposing Directive (EU) 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD), thus finalizing the national implementation process. At the core of the German transposition of the CDSMD is the “Act on the Copyright Liability of Online Content Sharing Service Providers” (Urheberrechts-Diensteanbieter-Gesetz – UrhDaG), which implements…

Despite the turbulent times Italian politics have experienced in the past year – which led to a change of government in the midst of the pandemic emergency – the ball of the transposition of the CDSM Directive (CDSMD) into Italian law is still rolling. As of today, it is difficult to predict whether the deadline…

In a trial to assess the quantum of financial loss in the IPEC, FBT Productions LLC v Let Them Eat Vinyl Limited [2021] EWHC 932 (IPEC), Deputy High Court Judge Ian Karet found the claimant was not entitled to damages for loss of opportunity since that defendant’s wrongdoing did not cause the loss. Damages for…