In the last year, the German Copyright Act has experienced what is probably its most substantial reform since it first came into force in 1966. The reason for this was the implementation of the DSM Copyright Directive 2019/790/EU (DSMD) and Directive 2019/789/EU (Online SatCab Directive). Secondly, the legislature felt obliged, in response to certain CJEU…

This contribution is based on a paper published in 44 European Intellectual Property Law Review 595 (2022)   Photographs are included in Article 2(1) of the Berne Convention as copyrightable artistic works. All Berne Union Member States must thus provide copyright protection to photographic works. As is known, originality has always been the essential requirement…

  Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) is a programme by European library and research associations IFLA, LIBER and SPARC Europe to mobilise the potential of Europe’s knowledge institutions, particularly libraries, to engage with others across the spectrum of the access to knowledge movement to build momentum towards long term copyright reform that benefits library users and…

  COMMUNIA and Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte co-hosted the Filtered Futures conference on 19 September 2022 to discuss fundamental rights constraints of upload filters after the CJEU ruling on Article 17 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD). This blog post is based on the author’s contribution to the conference’s first session…

    COMMUNIA and Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte co-hosted the Filtered Futures conference on 19 September 2022 to discuss fundamental rights constraints of upload filters after the CJEU ruling on Article 17 of the copyright directive. This blog post is the author’s contribution to the conference’s first session “Fragmentation or Harmonisation? The impact of the Judgement…

Nelson Mandela said that “Education is the most powerful weapon to change the world”, but is it powerful enough to change copyright? A long-standing debate has been going on regarding the supporting, or rather, hindering role of copyright rules in educational settings. Recent developments shed new hope. With Article 5 of the CDSM Directive, the…

This post is the second instalment of an analysis of the ‘very short extracts’ (VSE) carve-out to the press publishers’ right set forth in Article 15 of the CDSM Directive. The first part examined the legal nature of the VSE rule, concluding that it ought to be qualified not as an ‘exception’, but as a…

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…

Article 17 has been a (the) leading buzzword of the copyright reforms of the European Union in recent years (at least half a decade already). The transposition deadline has now passed. As of June 6, 2021, however, only a handful of Member States have implemented Directive 2019/790/EU (Copyright in the Digital Single Market; hereinafter CDSMD)….

Parts 1 to 3 of this post (originally published in “Auteurs & Media”) summarising case law of the German Bundesgerichtshof from 2015 to 2019 are available here, here and here.         VII. Copyright contract law (Sections 31 et seqq. UrhG) Right of remuneration (Sections 32 et seqq. UrhG) German copyright law stipulates…