©-LAW

A few months ago, this blog  reported  that the EU Commission had issued a  Notice to stakeholders on the impact that a no-deal Brexit would have on UK copyright .  At that time, UK's withdrawal from the EU without any agreement in place must have seen impossible: if one looks at the comments to the relevant post, a reader who called themselves a 'Broptimist' stated that the EU Commission's document did  relate "to a worst-case scenario, and one that is highly unlikely to come to pass". As things stand now, however, the level of likelihood of such a scenario has increased ... Today UK Government has issued a number of technical notices relating to: Exhaustion of intellectual property rights if there’s no Brexit deal Patents if there’s no Brexit deal Trade marks and designs if there’s no Brexit deal Copyright if there’s no Brexit deal The IPKat will analyze these documents and revert, but this evening my attention could not but go to the co...

Rodarte S/S 2019 Yesterday  The New York Times  published  a very interesting article  by fashion expert Vanessa Friedman, which praises the spring/summer 2019 collections presented by  Telfar  and  Rodarte  during New York Fashion Week, as being about fashion that consumers do not really know they want yet.  Apparently it has become commonplace for fashion houses to produce garments that consumers already want. As explained by Friedman,  There’s a lot of pressure these days to design by algorithm. We know too much about buying habits and likes, and the result is an insidious bias toward giving people what they have already indicated they want. It may be safe, and easier to sell, but it’s antithetical to the whole point of fashion, which should be about giving people what they never knew they wanted — what they couldn’t imagine they wanted — until they saw it. But how is all this 'profiling' done? It will not c...

LeBron James's avatar in NBA 2K18 Copyright and tattoos is one of The IPKat’s favourite topics. Over time a few posts have been devoted to exploring the intricacies of copyright law as applied to this type of works: see, eg  here ,   here ,  here ,  here ,  here ,  here ,  here . However, as Jeremy  recalled   - despite all this interest - The IPKat sports no tattoos,  not least because of the mess it would make of the fur. Having said so, tattoos are artistic works with no particular features, if not the medium they are attached to, ie the human body. From a copyright standpoint, issues might arise in a number of circumstances, including when: The owner of the body (clearly a tangible medium) on which the tattoo is affixed is not  also  the owner of the copyright in the work (the tattoo); The tattoo reproduced on someone's body is an infringing copy of a third-party copyright work. While the f...