Europol and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) have recently jointly published an Intellectual Property Crime Threat Assessment. This report explores piracy and counterfeiting and is based on data from across the EU as well as Europol’s operational information. The report concludes that piracy and counterfeiting continue to pose a serious threat to the…
After two years of virtual-only meetings owing to the pandemic, on Friday 27 May 2022, the European Copyright Society (ECS) will gather in-person in Nottingham to discuss the constitutional turn and evolution of copyright law over the past few years, highlighting its influences from and interrelation with human rights law and related aspects such as…
Last week the European Commission published its proposal for a Data Act. The proposal is the second major element of the European Data Strategy presented in 2020 and complements the Data Governance Act that is expected to be formally adopted this spring. As expected, the proposed Data Act introduces rules strengthening user access and portability…
The buzz around AI-generated outputs seems to never stop. While the field is rich on exaggerated claims, there are certain domains that have seen a genuine revolution fueled by AI. One such field is journalism. In the past years, sophisticated AI algorithms have become a meaningful assistant in the European news industry. Going beyond mere…
At the time that Directive 2019/790/EU (DSM Directive) was being developed, much media attention was focussed, over a period of many months, on the liability of online content sharing service providers for content uploaded by their users. Initially in Art. 13 and ultimately in Art. 17 of the DSM Directive, the Directive stipulates that online…
Fashion is an industry largely led by seasonal trends. Status-conferring new designs are being launched bi-annually, during the Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer fashion shows, to meet the needs of our capitalistic society. Even though fashion designs are often inspired by the prior art, seasonal trends precondition innovation – new design themes that make the highly desirable…
“Web3 cannot and should not be reduced to blockchain when the real shift is towards user ownership of digital assets… This definitional shift focuses attention on what assets can be legally owned and the meaning of ownership “rights,” more generally, in the emerging digital spaces of web3.” The Rift Over Web3 The week before…
Fundamental Rights are the constants in many constitutional orders. They provide stability, continuity in values and encapsulate the normative skeleton of a society. Especially in times of change, they serve as guiding principles for citizens, governments and, if push comes to shove, the judiciary. Amongst the many examples in which fundamental rights have demonstrated their…
At the beginning of 2021, half a year before the implementation deadline of the DSM directive, only a single EU member state (the Netherlands) had passed a full implementation of the DSM directive. By the date of the implementation deadline a mere three Member States had fully implemented the directive, and by the end of…
At the end of 2021, YouTube’s first Copyright Transparency Report 2021 (“Report”) was published. It is interesting to look at this Report against the background of the 2019 EU rules for the liability of platforms like YouTube through the famous Art. 17 DSM Directive 2019/790 (“DSMD”). But first let’s take a look at Mars (the…
