Earlier this week, the European Commission published a recommendation for a common European data space for cultural heritage. As Executive Vice-President for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age, Margrethe Vestager, explained, “[t]he tragic burning of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris showed the importance of digitally preserving culture and the lockdowns highlighted the need for…

Let’s imagine that, in the near future, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) receives a request for a preliminary ruling referring the following question: “Must Article 17(4) of Directive 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market be interpreted as precluding a national law which allows copyright holders to bring…

On 21st October 2021, Facebook announced that it has reached an agreement with APIG, an association of French press publishers, committing itself to the payment of licensing fees pursuant to the press publishers’ right introduced by the 2019 Copyright Directive. According to Facebook’s press release, the agreement “means that people on Facebook will be able…

On the 16th of October 2020, one year ago, a middle-school teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded by a terrorist who would not know of his existence if not for a number of videos posted on social media, against which Mr. Paty had filed for defamation with the local police. Yet, a law against publishing heinous…

Welcome to the third trimester of 2021 round up of EU copyright law! In this series we update readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. You can read the first and second trimester round…

We have recently published a white paper, authored by Julia Reda (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte) and Paul Keller (Open Future) that proposes to build a public repository of Public Domain and openly licensed works. While the idea of creating repositories of Public Domain and openly licensed works is not new as such, we are proposing to…

On 17 June 2021, the CJEU delivered its judgment in C-597/19 Mircom. It held that uploading (including automatic uploading) of pieces of a file containing a protected work on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks infringes the making available right under article 3(1) and (2) of the InfoSoc Directive when a user actively chooses to use sharing software…

In retrospect, life was simple in 1996, the year that gave us the Database directive and its much-maligned sui generis right aimed at promoting a European database industry. Fast forward and see: The Database directive stands unchanged and there is still no clear evidence that the then-new intellectual property right is an effective instrument. At…

Welcome to the second trimester of 2021 round up of EU copyright law! Apologies to readers that this one comes a bit late. In this series, we update readers every three months on developments in EU copyright law. This includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy…