As succinctly noted by Susan Bischoff in a prior post, the ongoing legal saga surrounding the ‘Metall auf Metall’ case continues to yield legal insights. Presently, a new reference from the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) asks the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for vital interpretive guidance concerning the parody exception…
On 30 December 2022, the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) issued an order that intervened again on the interpretation of the quotation exception under Article 70 of the Italian Copyright Act (l. 633/1941, l.aut.). The decision concerns an advertising campaign of a mineral water company. The commercial video promoting the mineral water features a…
This post is based in part on an amicus brief filed by the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic on behalf of Authors Alliance and ComicMix before the United States Supreme Court in Jack Daniels v. VIP Products. Ordinarily, authors who write parodies look to copyright limitations and exceptions to protect their rights. In the United States, the…
Part I of this post discussed the changes to copyright contract law and the new text and data mining exemption provisions that formed part of the 2021 copyright law reform. Part 2 explores further exemptions for users of works, new aspects of the right of communication to the public and the press publishers’ right. It…
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 third session “Beyond the Judgement: The Future…
This post is a summary of an editorial forthcoming in IIC – International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law. A pre-print is available for free download on SSRN. Like most exceptions in the EU copyright acquis, the general parody exception in Article 5(3)(k) of the InfoSoc Directive was originally designed as optional, meaning…
Introduction The Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC), part of the English High Court, has ruled that copyright subsists in the character of Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter and that a character can be protected as a literary work under the UK’s closed list of copyright works ([2022] EWHC 1379 IPEC). That copyright was found to have…
With its landmark decision in Poland/Parliament and Council of 26 April 2022 (case C-401/19), the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has clarified that the filtering obligations arising from Article 17(4)(b) and (c) of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market 2019/790 (“DSM Directive” or “DSMD”), are…
Like most copyright systems, French copyright law does not leave much room for the freedom of authors of transformative graphic works (also called “derivative works”). Three interesting cases on derivative works, two involving Jeff Koons and one Tintin, have recently put French copyright law in the international spotlight (e.g. here and here). The American transformative…
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…
