On 29 July 2019, the CJEU delivered its hotly awaited decision in the case Spiegel Online GmbH v Volker Beck (C 516/17). The decision is part of a trilogy of preliminary references raised by the German courts focusing on copyright exceptions and the interaction of copyright law with fundamental rights (Pelham, C‑476/17 and Funke Medien…
On 12 September 2019, the CJEU held that according to article 2(a) of Directive 2001/29 (the InfoSoc Directive), Member States’ copyright laws can no longer protect models (in other words works of applied art or designs) on the ground that, beyond their utilitarian purpose, they generate a distinctive and significant visual effect from an aesthetic…
On remand, the district court must apply the Fogerty factors in determining whether the photographer is entitled to an attorney fee award. Given its determination that a media company committed copyright infringement by posting a copyrighted photograph of singer Willie Nelson on a radio station website without including the required Creative Commons attributions, the federal…
Almost a decade after the first complaint was lodged, the judgment in the Series Yonkis case was delivered by the Murcia Criminal Court in June. This case is considered to be the most important court case to date in relation to downloads of content protected by intellectual property rights in Spain. For 7 years (from…
The statutory schemes of Italian and U.S. copyright law differ in their allocation of authorship status in that Italian law does not recognize the ab initio statutory allocation of copyright to the commissioner of a work made for hire. The assignment to a music publisher of composer Ennio Morricone’s copyrights in six Italian movie scores…
In a recent UK High Court decision Charlotte Tilbury was able to claim artistic copyright in two designs subsisting in its Starlight Palette make-up palette and successfully prove infringement by Aldi and its lookalike palette. In a rare move for infringements of this nature, the court gave summary judgment on the view that Aldi had…
Dismissal on claim preclusion grounds of suit brought by Media Rights Technologies, Inc., mostly affirmed, but reversed as to products that Microsoft sold after the date when MRT filed a patent infringement suit against Microsoft involving the same set of operative facts, which had been dismissed. The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has…
A word (verbal) sign (trademark) in which neither the choice of words nor their arrangement and connection are a manifestation of a creative invention, and nor are they original or create a result that could be defined as the manifestation of intellectual activity of a person with an autonomous creative value, is not a work…
German Federal Supreme Court’s decisions of 21 February 2019 (ref.: I ZR 98/17, I ZR 99/17 and I ZR 15/18) Protection of moral rights in Germany, in particular the right to prohibit distortion of the work Moral rights derived from copyright are not harmonized within the European Union. Rather, every EU member state has developed…
This October one year will have passed since the legal acts transposing the provisions of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled became applicable in EU Member States. Regulation 2017/1563 on the cross-border exchange between the Union and third countries of accessible…
