©-LAW

 A little over a year ago, The IPKat  reported   on the then fresh decision of the Paris Court of Appeal, which had upheld the decision at first instance in a copyright infringement case originally brought by the estate of photographer  Jean-François Bauret  against the well-known (also to copyright litigators) US artist  Jeff Koons  and the  Centre Pompidou . The news has reached this blog that  another copyright decision  has recently been rendered against Koons. Background The case is once again one of copyright infringement. It was originally brought by artist and photographer Franck Davidovici and concerned the alleged reproduction of his work  Fait d’Hiver , which he realized as a freelance artist for a 1984 Naf Naf advertisement, in Koons’s 1988 porcelain work, also titled  Fait d'Hiver . Davidovici's  Fait d'Hiver Koons's  Fait d'Hiver Koons’s work, which is part of the  Banality  series  (one w...

The IPKat's favourite fictional character Last year, I was fortunate enough to be invited by  Associate Professor Yann Basire (Director-General of CEIPI)  to participate in a great (and cool!) conference he organized in Strasbourg on  Pop Culture and IP . The topic I was asked to discuss was trade mark protection of fictional characters, and the contribution will be published in 2020 as part of a collection edited by Yann and entitled  Propriété Intellectuelle et Pop Culture  (LexisNexis, coll. IRPI). But what about copyright protection of fictional characters: is it possible? how far could it go? Copyright protection is available to any work in a  Berne  and, now, EU sense. While no particular issues arise in relation to the literary, artistic or dramatic works that feature certain characters, in that they are regarded as ‘traditional’ copyright subject matter, whether copyright also vests in fictional characters as such has occ...

G-Star Elwood, a style of jeans that G-Star claims Cofemel to have copied in the background  Portuguese  proceedings As  announced  on The IPKat, last week the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its Cofemel , C-683/17   [not yet available in English] . It ruled that, as far as designs are concerned, no other requirement is mandated for copyright protection to arise under the  InfoSoc Directive , but the sufficient originality of the design at issue. much awaited judgment in  Earlier case law  The ruling is not surprising, considering earlier CJEU case law, most notably the decision in  Flos , C-168/09 . This was a reference from Italy asking about the compatibility with EU law of certain Italian provisions that the Court of First Instance of Milan had deemed potentially incompatible with the principle of cumulation envisaged under EU law. The Italian approach to copyright protection of designs has been traditi...

Members of the Court in 2018 On this day 10 years ago, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued the judgment that set a new course for the development and construction of EU copyright law, a course in which the role of EU judiciary would become as important as and, in certain areas, even more important than that of EU legislative.  That decision is the one in  Infopaq , C-5/08 .  As readers know, the core of that referral concerned the notion of reproduction 'in part': is it an infringement of the right of reproduction in Article 2 of the  InfoSoc Directive  to reproduce short extracts of newspaper articles without a licence? To answer this, the CJEU said that there is reproduction 'in part' when what is being reproduced is sufficiently original.  Fair enough: the Court could have stopped here - nothing too surprising. In fact, unlike what is for subject matter like  software ,  databases ...

Is there even such thing called 'originality'? Is the originality requirement in copyright a non-requirement? In other words: is there any meaningful threshold to copyright protection? I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this issue three times over less than a month: first, at a workshop in Berlin, then with a Belgian student and, finally, with an IP lawyer based outside Europe. If these three situations had anything in common, it was the suggestion that the originality requirement is not really a requirement – whether under EU or US law – and that copyright protection is very easy to obtain. While it is true that originality is not a particularly difficult condition to satisfy, it is still a requirement and: (1) it is not a mundane one, both in the EU and the US; and (2) there are a few instances in which the threshold would unlikely be passed. The EU originality requirement If we start from the EU, since the landmark decision of the Court of Justice of th...