The members of the European Copyright Society (ECS) have recently sent a letter to Mr. Thierry Breton (Commissioner for Internal Market, European Commission) outlining their view of what should be the priorities for a future agenda in the field of copyright law. The letter is available here and its contents are reproduced below.   The…

In 2019, the EU’s Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSMD) was adopted. This included the highly controversial Articles 15 and 17 on, respectively, the new press publishers’ right (PPR) and the new copyright liability scheme for OCSSPs (“online content-sharing services providers”). In a report published in September 2022, I undertook research into the…

Following a long and winding procedure, Directive 2019/790 on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM Directive) and the SatCab 2.0 Directive (2019/789) were adopted last year. EU Member States started the implementation at different paces. (See CREATe and Communia’s datasets on national implementations.) Following a multi-event public consultation period in autumn 2019, the Hungarian…

On 12 September 2019, the CJEU held that according to article 2(a) of Directive 2001/29 (the InfoSoc Directive), Member States’ copyright laws can no longer protect models (in other words works of applied art or designs) on the ground that, beyond their utilitarian purpose, they generate a distinctive and significant visual effect from an aesthetic…

Here at the Kluwer Copyright Blog we are thrilled to have had the opportunity to ask Felix Reda MEP a few questions on some very topical copyright law issues.  We are very grateful to Felix for sparing time in his busy schedule to do the interview, and here’s what he had to say: 1. In…

A. Introduction and Background In copyright law the term ‘communication to the public’ marks the boundary between use which has a copyright law relevance and use which does not. The interpretation of the term within EU member states is based on various EU directives. Of note however, is that the term communication to the public…

Readers of this blog are familiar (or should I say fed up?) with the piecemeal legal framework of EU copyright. With nine directives in the field of copyright alone (plus one on enforcement), the legal patchwork is evident. One of the problems with this scenario is the interplay of the different directives with one another….

The bizarre saga known as Garcia v. Google has finally come to end with an eleven judge en banc decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Garcia v. Google, Inc., 786 F.3d 733 (9th Cir. 2015)). That holding came in response to a remarkable, if not astonishing holding by a…