On the 16 July 2020, the Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard Øe delivered his much-awaited opinion on the case of Peterson v YouTube (joined cases C-682/18 and 683/18), referred to the CJEU by the German Federal Court of Justice. Having explicitly precluded the consideration of provisions of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive…
As we enter a new year, we would like to take this opportunity to pass on our best wishes for 2021 to all of our readers, as well as reflect on developments in copyright over the past year. Despite its challenges, last year was another busy one in the copyright world, with ongoing European copyright…
Transposing Directives into national laws is a delicate balancing exercise. The potential pitfalls multiply when the Directive’s EU Official Journal translations present inaccuracies, leading to confusion at the Member State level. The translation errors in Article 17 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (DCDSM) form the core…
Introduction The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on intellectual property (IP) law undoubtedly ranks as one of the most-discussed topics of 2020 among legal academics and practitioners (including on this blog). Following initiatives at WIPO, the EPO and several national IPOs (including the UKIPO and the USPTO), EU institutions have now also become active in…
A group of leading international academics has published an open letter concerning the right of revocation. This new right, regulating copyright contracts, is provided for in article 22 of the recent EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The letter addressed to the European Commission and the relevant national authorities of EU Member States,…
The legislative agenda of the past two decades – both in Europe and further afield – has been about adapting copyright to the requirements of the information society. The administrative means to make use of those new opportunities by licensing at the right source and allocating revenues to the right recipients, in a world of…
By now everyone in the world must have heard of Sweden, especially European copyright lawyers. This post concerns two recent preliminary rulings from the CJEU, both at the request of Swedish courts. As both involved the communication to the public right, and both led the CJEU to pronounce the infrequently heard incantation that Article 3…
The first part of this blogpost analysed the main theoretical foundations of the AG’s Opinion in the VG Bild-Kunst case (C‑392/19). The second part focuses on the application of this theoretical background to frame links and inline (automatic) links. As will be shown, the AG has proposed a methodological model of distinction between hyperlinks on…
On September 10, 2020 the Advocate General (AG) Maciej Szpunar delivered his Opinion on the case of VG Bild-Kunst v Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitzanother (C‑392/19), a further case concerning the legality of linking. The assessment of linking from an EU copyright law perspective appears to be a labyrinthine legal exercise, since, following the seminal Svensson (C‑466/12)…
Part 1 of this blog post introduced the claim by rightsholders and some other commentators that Article 17 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive) is a mere clarification of existing Court of Justice case-law on communication to the public and intermediary liability. The second part of this blog…
