©-LAW

  Can a rightholder restrict linking by contract, eg by imposing the adoption of technological measures?  This, in a nutshell, is the core issue at the heart of the referral to the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in  VG Bild-Kunst , C-392/19, which was  decided  this morning. The Court answered in the affirmative. The referred question was: Does the embedding of a work – which is available on a freely accessible website with the consent of the rightholder – in the website of a third party by way of framing constitute communication to the public of that work within the meaning of Article 3(1) of [the  InfoSoc] Directive 2001/29/EC  where it occurs through circumvention of protection measures against framing taken or instigated by the rightholder? The ruling is important because it addresses an issue that was left outstanding after a string of CJEU decisions, starting as early as the 2014 ruling in  Svensson  ...

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’...