Background On 8 September 2022, the Brussels court of appeal delivered a long-awaited judgment in a case between the collective management organisation “Belgian Association of Authors, Composers and Publishers” (“SABAM”) and a wide array of music festival organisers in Belgium, the overarching Federation of Music Festivals in Flanders (“FMFF”) and British direct licensing company Pace…

This case concerned the famous Brompton bicycle which can be folded to carry away after use (Case C‑833/18, SI, Brompton Bicycle Ltd. v. Chedech / Get2Get); the author commented on the Advocate General’s opinion here and here. The bike was once protected by a patent and, following its expiry, the defendant (Get2Get) started selling a…

On 6 August 2019 the Ondernemingsrechtbank Antwerpen (the court) submitted a request for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on a dispute between Mircom, a company registered under Cypriot law, and Telenet, a Belgian internet service provider whose users presumably shared copyright protected works via Bit-torrent. This case…

Part I of this post provided an overview of the facts of the case and the recent opinion of AG Campos Sanchez-Bordona. Overall, the opinion is a mixed result. It makes some good points but also some ill-judged ones, and these will be explored in more detail in this post. Let us start with the positive…

This case concerned the famous Brompton bicycle which can be folded to carry away after use (Case C‑833/18, SI, Brompton Bicycle Ltd. v. Chedech / Get2Get). The bike was once protected by a patent and, following its expiry, the defendant (Chedech/Get2Get) embarked on selling a similar bike in Belgium (the designs of the two bikes…

Case C‑572/13, HP v. Reprobel, 12 November 2015 By Philippe Laurent and Céline Wulleman, Marx Van Ranst Vermeersch & Partners As we know, Member States may adopt exceptions to the reproduction right of authors in the cases and under the conditions listed in Article 5 of Directive 2001/29. Some of those exceptions may be transposed…

The Belgian legal order has recently welcomed a new legal code:  the Code of Economic Law (CEL).  Laws are not systematically arranged in codes in Belgium: there are some codes (such as the judicial code, the criminal code, codes of various types of taxes etc.) as well as countless separate laws, acts and regulations for…

On the 13th March 2015, the President of the Brussels French speaking Court of First Instance pronounced a judgment to the detriment of Sabam, an important collective management organisation in Belgium. In 2011 Sabam decided to claim a fee from Internet access providers in exchange for a licence which allows these providers to communicate copyright…

Judgment CJEU, 3 September 2014, Deckmyn and Vrijheidsfonds (C-201/13). Request for a preliminary ruling from the Hof van Beroep te Brussel (Belgium). Belgian copyright law provides that “once a work has been lawfully published, its author may not prohibit caricature, parody and pastiche, observing fair practices”. This provision, which existed before the adoption of the…

“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…