“No need to wait for the ECJ, the Court replied.”

In Belgium, besides being a tort from a civil law perspective, a copyright infringement can also be a criminal offence, on the condition that it is done “with malicious or fraudulent intent”. When copyright infringements are committed by unknown perpetrators (which is quite common on the internet), it is usual to file a complaint with an examining magistrate who is endowed with specific criminal investigation powers.

This is what the producer of “Fait d’hiver” (an Academy award nominee short film) did after noticing that the movie had been entirely uploaded on YouTube and embedded in the pages of two websites, namely koreus.com and [...]

On 26 January 2012, the Belgian Supreme Court decided to quash an appeal decision deeming that “when requiring that a work must show the stamp of the author’s personality in order to benefit from copyright protection, the judges of appeal do not validate their decision in law”. According to the Supreme Court, a literary or artistic work is protected by copyright on condition that it is original in the sense that it is the author’s own intellectual creation, and it is therefore not required that the work carry the stamp of the author’s personality. One should stress that such decision is all the more surprising that the “stamp of the author’s personality” can be considered as ha [...]

The CJEU’s ruling in the Scarlet v. SABAM case (C 70/10) is still fresh in our memories: court injunctions to install global and preventative filtering systems with a view to preventing copyright infringements are precluded. SABAM asked again for the same measures in the framework of the SABAM v. Netlog litigation. Again, the Belgian court referred the question to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling. Again, the CJEU repeated mutatis mutandis its reasoning and reached the same conclusion (C 360/10). Bis repetetita placent?

Not exactly: whereas Scarlet is an ISP, Netlog is a Facebook-like online social network. This brings along several factual differences which could have had consequences as [...]

This sentence summarizes quite well the decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal of 26 September 2011 which it is abstracted from.

The Belgian Anti-piracy Federation filed a cease and desist action against Telenet and Belgacom, two Belgian ISPs, in order to make them block The Pirate Bay’s websites in their respective networks.

In first instance, the President of the Commercial Court of Antwerp rejected the claims as he deemed that the requested measures were disproportionate.

The Court of Appeal overruled the decision and granted an injunction on basis of art. 87, §1, al.2 of the Belgian Copyright Act, which transposes art. 8, §3 of the InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/CE, and which provides th [...]

In this post, I would like to come back to an interesting decision of the Belgian Cour de Cassation of 7 October 2010, which confirmed that a cease and desist action could be successfully sought against a copyright licensee. As usual, the Supreme Court’s decision is quite concise and does not extensively detail the facts. In short, the decision’s background is a litigation between a television company and a collecting society, where the former refused to pay some royalties to the latter. The collecting society therefore sought a cease and desist injunction against the TV company.

Some relevant paragraphs of the decision can be translated and summarized as follows:

- A cease and desist ac [...]

On 19 November 1992, the European Council adopted the Directive 92/100/EEC on rental right and lending right and on certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property (now replaced by Directive 2006/115/EC), which provides an exclusive right to authorize or prohibit the rental and lending of originals and copies of copyrighted works. The Directive also provides that Member States may derogate from the exclusive right in respect of public lending, provided that at least authors obtain a remuneration for such lending, and that Member States shall be free to determine this remuneration taking account of their cultural promotion objectives. The Directive had to be transpos [...]

BELGIUM – In a case of SABAM (the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers) versus a counterfeits dealer, the Belgian Supreme Courts finds that in litigations against copyright infringers, collecting societies can prove the existence of management contracts pertaining to some works by solely producing the official repertoire listing that they mandatorily have to keep updated.

For the full text of this case click here

A summary of this case will be posted on www.KluwerIPCases.com soon

Two contradictory legislative proposals have been quite recently submitted for discussion at the Belgian Parliament, which should implement solutions to the thorny file-sharing issue.

On the one hand, Senators Morael and Pyryns proposed on 9 December 2010 [Doc 5-590/1] a law “aiming at adapting the perception of copyright to the technological evolution while preserving privacy rights of the Internet users”. This proposal aims at establishing a “global” licensing scheme that would authorize file sharing amongst internet users through peer-to-peer. Remunerations would be negotiated between stakeholders, and rendered compulsory by way of a royal decree (if negotiations fail, the King wo [...]

In case C 393/09, the ECJ decided that a GUI is not a form of expression of a computer program and cannot therefore be protected by copyright as a computer program under Directive 91/250/EEC. Indeed, that directive protects the forms of expression of a computer program and the preparatory design work capable of leading, respectively, to the reproduction or the subsequent creation of such a program. A GUI is an interaction interface which enables the user to communicate with the program and to make use of its features: it is only an element of the program which does not enable its reproduction, and which does not constitute a form of expression of the latter, either.
Nevertheless, the ECJ con [...]

Bankruptcy brings always its share of bad surprises, and it usually gets dodgier when intellectual property is involved… In this post, we propose a review of a decision of the Belgian Supreme Court illustrating this observation in the software development sector. We will start with the legal provisions applied by the Court and its decision to finally consider its consequences when applied to the facts of the case.
Article 2, §3 of the Directive 91/250/EEC (now 2009/24/EC) on the legal protection of computer programs provides that where a computer program is created by an employee in the execution of his duties or following the instructions given by his employer, the employer exclusively s [...]