©-LAW

  A few days ago the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rendered its   judgment in C-433/20  Austro-Mechana , ruling that the notion of reproduction ‘on any medium’ extends to the cloud and, therefore, that private copying under Article 5(2)(b) of the   InfoSoc Directive   also applies in that context. Kat cloud ... The judgment is in line with last year’s  Opinion  of Advocate General (AG) Hogan  [ here ]  and clarifies the treatment of private copying in the context of cloud computing, this being something that had been previously asked to the Court (in the context of the  VCAST  referral:  here ), but which the CJEU did not expressly address, preferring instead to focus on the qualification of providers of cloud-based storage facilities that give access to protected content to users based in territories for which no licence is in place. Background This referral from Austria was made in the context of litigation be...

Kat cloud   Does the private copying exception and, with it, the fair compensation requirement under Article 5(2)(b) of the   InfoSoc Directive   apply to reproductions carried out by using cloud-based recording services? If so, can rightholders request the providers of such a service to impose a levy even if their customers (natural persons) have already paid one when purchasing the devices (eg, computers, smartphones, tablets) subsequently used to undertake acts of reproduction covered by that provision? These, in essence, are the issues that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has been called upon to decide in  Austro-Mechana , C-433/20 , a pending referral from Austria. IPKat readers interested in all things private copying (who’s not …) will be aware that private copying in the cloud is not an entirely novel issue for the CJEU. A few years ago, in fact, in  VCAST , C-265/16   [ here ]  the Court was asked questions relating to reprod...