“The latest development is that GEMA has filed another lawsuit against YouTube, demanding from YouTube to take down the on-screen notice ‘Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.’”
YouTube and GEMA (the German Society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights) do have something in common: they are both committed to entertainment, since they could not exist without it. This connection embroils YouTube and GEMA in a multitude of ways. They do not appear to be amused about it though; and so they fight in many different ways. Even the technology-savvy observer will inevit [...]
“It held that in the case of a normally developed 13-year old child the condition “fulfils the requirements of his duty to supervise” is met when the parents regularly advise and instruct their children on the fact that illegal activities such as file sharing shall not be permitted.”
In a very recent case (I ZR 74/12; delivered on Thursday the 15th of November 2012) the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has delivered another judgment dealing with copyright infringement occurring in the virtual sphere, which in this particular case have been committed by a minor through the use of peer-to-peer file sharing networks. The judgment was widely anticipated and has already been labeled a precede [...]
“According to the current formulation of the draft law, material quoted by humans for commentary and analysis, as opposed to that automatically selected by a computer, may be copied freely.”
The link wars have once again broken out in Europe. In August, the German cabinet gave its backing to a draft law allowing news publishers to collect compensation for the republication of headlines and the introductory sentences of articles by aggregators and search engines. Under the proposal, which would protect content for one year, news publishers would be able to license out snippeting rights for a royalty and start proceedings against those found to infringe their newfound neighbouring right. T [...]
“The judgment casts a spotlight on a distinct feature of collective rights management in Germany and the difficulties that may ensue for creators and users of musical creations who want to license such material under an alternative licensing scheme.”
The case that came before the Local Court Frankfurt/Main concerned a dispute between the German Society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights (Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte, GEMA) and a song contest organiser (defendant). In the course of a music contest, entrants were asked to submit a song through the defendant’s website and permit for the song to being exploited ( [...]
By Benjamin Schütze, Institute of Legal Informatics, Leibniz Universität Hannover
“Since its introduction in 2003, the provision marks the centre of a controversy between schools and institutions of higher education and copyright holders, especially publishing houses marketing a scientific – educational portfolio.”
About the right to make available small parts of a work for illustration purposes for teaching in schools and higher education and how it is interpreted by OLG Stuttgart in Alfred Kröner Verlag GmbH & Co. KG v Fernuniversität in Hagen (4 U 171/11).
The dispute between the parties centres on the question of whether Fernuniversität Hagen shall be permitted under § 52a Germ [...]
“Some said this would be like an Opera House charging the taxi drivers for taking the audience to the venue.”
It has been more than three years now since the infamous idea of a new neighbouring right for press publishers appeared in the coalition agreement of the second Merkel government out of thin air. On the face of it, the approach seemed somewhat reasonable: To give press publishers a neighbouring right just like the ones enjoyed by other key players of content production, f.e. film and phonogram producers.
First ideas for an implementation circled around a kind of online press levy, to be payed by any commercial or public entity. There were reports about the respective collecting socie [...]
German Court of First instance rules that YouTube is only liable for secondary liability for user’s infringing uploads, but must prevent future infringements of identified works by screening of and implementing a word filter for new uploads.
In this test run case the German composers and lyricists collecting society GEMA claimed that 12 songs of its repertoire were made accessible via YouTube without permission and that YouTube LLC was primarily liable for copyright infringement. YouTube’s reaction to this had been to cancel any further negotiations with GEMA about payments for GEMA repertoire content being uploaded to YouTube. Also, YouTube had pre-emptively blocked numerous videos that pot [...]
The German Federal Court of Justice rejects liability for image search thumbnails even if they are indexed on websites showing the images without permission as long as other websites did so with the rights holder’s consent.
The first landmark case involving thumbnail previews of Google’s image search function in Germany (Vorschaubilder I, 2010) had dealt with indexation of images put online by the rights holder herself with no robots.txt file telling search bots not to index these images. Criticised by many, the Federal Court of Justice in that first case in effect established an opt-out rule where the rights holder has to actively indicate not to allow indexing in order to get injunctive re [...]
As reported by the Dutch commentator Lucie Guibault in her recent Blogpost the Dutch government (in the person of the secretary of state, Fred Teeven) plans to restrict the private copying limitation. Downloads from “obviously illegal sources” shall be declared unlawful. In Germany such a rule exists already, implemented in the course of the first and the second “Reform of the German Copyright in the Information Society” (the so called First and Second Basket). So far this step yielded no positive effects for the creators or the content industry. Quite the contrary!
No benefit for the rights holders whatsoever: The technical reason
On the one hand, the restriction of the private copy [...]
