On 21 March 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its ruling in case C-10/22 Liberi Autori ed Editori (LEA) v. Jamendo SA. The decision confirms that Independent Management Entities (“IMEs”) can provide their copyright management services in the European Union (EU) alongside Collective Management Organizations (“CMOs”). National legislation in one…

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is about to write yet another chapter in the never-ending, or so it seems, ‘Metall auf Metall’ saga. The facts of the case are all too familiar by now: in 2004, German band Kraftwerk took hip hop producer Moses Pelham to court for copyright infringement after…

In July 2023, the Court of Appeal in Wright & Ors v BTC Core & Ors [2023] EWCA Civ 868. overturned the High Court decision in which Mr Justice Mellor found that the Bitcoin File Format (the “BFF”) was not a protectable work in a copyright sense as it did not satisfy the fixation requirement…

This blog post contains an edited version of the European Copyright Society’s Opinion on Case C-227/23, Kwantum Nederland and Kwantum België.   The Berne Convention underscores the national treatment of foreign authors, allowing Union states to protect designs through various means. Article 2(7) introduces a material reciprocity test, limiting copyright protection for works of applied…

For more than seven decades, international law has consistently led countries to embrace culture as a global and cross-border value for humanity. The human right to cultural participation has become a pillar of protecting and empowering individuals and communities. At the EU level, the competence to legislate on cultural matters is mostly left to the…

In Canada, the Federal Government has just announced a $2.4 billion package of measures “to secure Canada’s world-leading AI advantage.” This sum is in addition to the $2 billion of public funds already invested since 2017, when Canada became the first country in the world to launch a national AI strategy. Now, as then, the…

The rise in popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has attracted a great deal of attention from copyright practitioners and aficionados. And why is that? Basically, because an NFT is an encoded digital metadata file of a copy of a work that can be copyright protected. That is, in an NFT there can be an underlying…

WIPO negotiators appear prepared to approve a draft Broadcast Treaty that is no longer “signal-based” or limited to “traditional” (non-Internet-based) broadcasting.   There is a significant push at this week’s meetings of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights to approve a Diplomatic Conference on a Broadcasting Organizations Treaty…

In the middle of 2022, three significant AI text-to-image generators were made available to the public: Dall-E 2 (April 2022), Midjourney (July 2022), and Stability Diffusion (August 2022). In addition to raising questions about ownership of outputs, infringement in training, and the future of copyright as a policy tool to encourage creativity, economists are in…