©-LAW

Topazio, one of the soap operas produced by Delta TV Is YouTube an active host and, if so, ineligible for the safe harbour protection within Article 14 of the  E-commerce Directive ? As readers with an interest in intermediary liability know, this is not a novel question: indeed, it has been already raised a number of times before national courts. A few weeks ago, in a  decision available on Marchi & Brevetti  (sentenza 7 April 2017 No 1928, RG 38113/2013,  Delta TV v Google and YouTube  – judge rapporteur: Guglielmo Rende), the Tribunale di Torino (Turin Court of First Instance) revisited this issue, and provided an interesting response. Readers might recall that this decision follows other interim rulings commented on this blog  here  and  here . Background Back in 2013 Delta TV, which produces and owns the copyright to a number of South-American soap operas (including audiovisual works for the Italian, Monaco, Swis...

Yesterday this blog  reported  that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has issued yet another long-awaited judgment, this being the  decision in  Filmspeler , C-527/15 . At the time of writing, the text of the ruling was not yet available. Now that it is and having had a chance to read it, it seems to me that – despite its highly specific factual background (sale of multimedia players enabling free access to audiovisual works protected by copyright without the consent of the rightholders) - Filmspeler is a MAJOR copyright decision. The reason is essentially two-fold: ·         First, because the Court relaxed the notion of what amounts to an ‘indispensable intervention  [the judgment does not even contain a reference to the intervention being ‘indispensable’]  for the sake of the right of communication to the public within Article 3(1) of the  InfoSoc Directive . This means – as I also s...

Did you think that the story with copyright, linking, and the right of communication to the public  was over?  Of course not. Today the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its long-awaited  [even more keenly awaited is however the forthcoming ruling in  Ziggo , aka  The Pirate Bay  case,  here ]  decision in  Filmpeler , C-527/15 . Background As readers will remember, this reference for a preliminary ruling had  arisen in the context of litigation between Dutch anti-piracy organization  Stichting Brein  and Jack Frederik Wullems over the sale, by the latter and through - among other things - his site www.filmspeler.nl, of various models of a multimedia player under the name ‘ filmspeler ’.  Filmspeler is a player for connecting a source of image and/or sound signals to a television screen. If the multimedia player is connected to the internet, on the one hand, and to a user’...

Fearless Girl Readers will be aware that last month a sculpture by  Kristen Visbal , entitled  Fearless Girl ,   was unveiled in   Manhattan 's  Financial District  as an advertisement for an  index fund  which comprises gender diverse companies that have a higher percentage of women among their senior leadership  [read the Wikipedia entry  here ] .  Fearless Girl  was placed opposite the well-known (originally guerrilla art)  Charging Bull  by Italian-born sculptor  Arturo Di Modica . It is arguable that it is indeed because of this particular positioning that Visbal's artwork appears so powerful. Initially  Fearless Girl  was expected to stay in place just for a few weeks, but in late March it was announced that the sculpture would not be removed until February 2018. Despite some criticisms, one of the reasons of the success of  Fearless Girl  appears to be its perception as a symbo...

Determining whether a certain, unauthorised use of a work is shielded from liability by means of an exception is not an easy exercise.  Things may get even more complicated if the applicable law is that of a country, eg the UK and all the other EU Member States, that does not have an open-ended fair use-style exception but rather requires one to, first,  identify  what exception might be applicable to the case at hand and, secondly,  verify  that all the relevant conditions for the application of that particular exception are satisfied. As part of my  IP Materials Series , I have prepared a high-level checklist for my students (currently busy with their IP revision) of the questions to ask when determining whether a certain exception in the  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA)  is actually applicable to the case at hand. [ Of course, the checklist is only meant as a study aid, and does not pretend to be an exhaustive assessment of ...