The French Supreme Court (‘Cour de cassation’) has caused a stir in France (15 May 2015, No 13-27391), by quashing a judgment of the Court of Appeal of Paris for breaching Article 10-2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”). The Supreme Court held that before condemning an alleged infringer for copyright infringement, the…
Readers of this blog are familiar (or should I say fed up?) with the piecemeal legal framework of EU copyright. With nine directives in the field of copyright alone (plus one on enforcement), the legal patchwork is evident. One of the problems with this scenario is the interplay of the different directives with one another….
…and they show overwhelming support for the introduction of a mandatory copyright exception for text and data mining for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Back in September, we launched a blog poll on the potential introduction of a mandatory text and data mining exception. We asked our blog readers their views on the following statements:…
The Secretary of State’s decision to introduce section 28B of the CDPA 1988, which created an exception to copyright for personal private use without a mechanism for compensating rightholders, was found to be unlawful. The Secretary of State had introduced the provision on the basis that any harm caused to rightholders would be zero or…
Introduction The SGAE case recently resolved by the Spanish Competition Authority ended in a settlement agreement, as we previously reported . As we indicated in that article, this case did not just examine relations between the collecting society and users regarding the establishment of licensing terms and conditions. The initial analysis also tackled the complex…
E-book lending in public libraries (e-lending) and the need to extend the public lending right (PLR) to these practices has been discussed on several recent occasions. Following the Sieghart report on e-lending in 2013, the UK government has extended the PLR to e-book downloads occurring within the premises of UK libraries. In 2013-14 the Commission…
An interesting case about the legality of a regulation issued by the Estonian Government on the “blank tape levy” The Estonian Authors’ Society, Estonian Performers’ Union and Estonian Association of Phonogram Producers (right holders’ collecting societies) filed a complaint in the administrative court claiming monetary damages (income loss) from the Government of the Republic of…
Decision Oberlandesgericht (Court of Appeal) Hamburg of July 1, 2015, file no. 5 U 87/12 and Landgericht (District Court) Munich I of 30 June 2015, file no. 33 O. 9639/14 YouTube is the most popular video-sharing website in the world. As it is not entirely free of videos that infringe third party copyrights, it is…
The assignee of the rights to a screenplay by actress and author Emma Thompson about the life of historical figure Euphemia Gray (Effie Film, LLC) should not have been granted an award of nearly $500,000 in attorney fees and costs that it incurred in successfully seeking a declaratory judgment that its screenplay did not infringe…
The court held that the applicable law is determined by the lex loci protectionis (Schutzlandprinzip), therefore the question of authorship in Switzerland is determined by the Swiss “creator’s principle”, not the British principle of “work for hire“. Where it is claimed that there has been a parallel creation, inspired by elements in the public domain…
