On remand in a dispute between three academic publishers and Georgia State University about the university’s practice of distributing to students digital excerpts of copyrighted works without paying the publishers, a federal district court misinterpreted the mandate of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta and misapplied the defense of fair use when it granted…
The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has vacated in part a district court’s judgment after a jury trial in favor of the defendants and remanded for a new trial in a copyright infringement suit alleging that Led Zeppelin and members of the band copied the classic rock hit “Stairway to Heaven” from the…
The right of distribution is the least controversial of the three exclusive rights contained in the Information Society Directive (InfoSoc Directive). Yet, every now and then the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is asked to re-examine its scope. With far less interpretative imagination compared with the right of communication to the public,…
The novel “The Light Between Oceans” and a major motion picture based on it did not infringe a complaining author’s copyright in an unproduced screenplay, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City has decided. The Second Circuit affirmed a district court’s determination that, as a matter of law, the novel and film were…
The Patent and Market Court of Appeal upheld the first instance Court’s judgment, confirming that a motorboat could be protected by copyright as a work of applied art, and that this copyright had been infringed by the defendant. The Court also confirmed that as a starting point copyright always belongs to the physical creator and…
Estonian Authors’ Society (EAÜ), a collecting society that administers local and foreign authors’ economic rights in Estonia, sued SIA ADEONA, a Latvian music concert organizer, who organized a public concert in Estonia without acquiring a license for the public performance nor paying any license fee. In contrast to previous Estonian case law (EAÜ v. XXX,…
The Court reached the conclusion that since the cumulative criteria that formed the necessary condition for assessing “communication to the public” were not fulfilled, there was no communication of sound recordings to the public when a car rental company rented out rental cars equipped with a built-in radio. Consequently, Nordisk Biluthyrning was not liable to…
As discussed in Part I of this blogpost, the CJEU in Renckhoff was called, once again, to analyse the application of copyright in relation to the use of copyright-protected works on the Internet. The Renckhoff judgment is, therefore, another addition to the complex European copyright case law construction. To date, the often tailor-made jurisprudential solutions…
25 July 2018 marks a new episode in the Heks’nkaas saga. After tumultuous court proceedings at the national level and before the European Court of Justice, Advocate General M. Wathelet delivered his opinion in this controversial copyright dispute that is now pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). His opinion can…
The federal district court in Manhattan erred in dismissing copyright infringement claims brought by a group of professional sports photographers against the National Football League (NFL) and its teams, the Associated Press (AP), and Replay Photos, LLC (Replay), the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City has ruled. The photographers—who had granted licenses for…
