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The ECtHR Earlier this week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) had the opportunity to assess website blocking from the perspective of freedom of expression under Article 10 of the  European Convention on Human Rights   (ECHR) in its  judgment in  Vladimir Kharitonov v Russia   [see  here  and  here  for the commentaries of two of the third-party interveners in the case] . Background The applicant, Mr Kharitonov, is the owner and administrator of the website Electronic Publishing News (http://www.digital-books.ru), which features a compilation of news, articles and reviews about electronic publishing. The website is hosted by DreamHost, a service which hosts multiple websites, all with the same IP address but different domain names. In late 2012, the applicant became aware that access to his website had been blocked by a number of Russian ISPs as a result of an order of the Russian telecoms regulator (Roskomnadzor) which, in turn, had given effect to a dec

Lively drafting session ... Is an anticounterfeiting service regulation drafted by an IP lawyer protected by copyright? This, in a nutshell, is the question at the heart of the dispute initially brought by said IP lawyer against the organizers of a trade fair in the Venice area, who had allegedly copied the regulation that he had drafted. Last month, the Italian Supreme Court  ruled   (decision 10300/2020,  Casucci v Unipol Assicurazioni S.p.A. and Others , also commented in Italian  here ) that, in principle, a technical work like that one at hand could be eligible for copyright protection, subject to it being original. Background At first instance, the IP lawyer prevailed over the defendants.  However, in 2016, the Venice Court of Appeal ruled in favour of the defendants/appellants, holding that it was not apparent where the originality – and, thus, protectability - of said regulation would lie, since the regulation at hand was found to be a “standard legal te

A Brompton Bicycle bike (top) and its alleged counterfeit (bottom) in the background national proceedings Since its seminal ruling  Infopaq  nearly 11 years ago  [Kat-celebration  here ] , the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has been contributing fundamentally to both shaping and placing the building blocks of copyright protection in the EU.  Through a string of decisions (the most important being  Infopaq ,  BSA ,  FAPL ,  Painer ,  Football Dataco ,  SAS ,  Levola Hengelo , and  Cofemel ), the Court has answered the most basic and relevant question:  When does copyright protection arise? Today, the CJEU has issued  yet another ruling  contributing to this very debate. It did so in the context of a referral from Belgium -  Brompton Bicycle , C-833/18  - concerning copyright protection of functional shapes (in the background proceedings, it is the shape of Brompton Bicycle's folding bike)  [see  here  for an explanation of the background to the ca