©-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...

Last week, the Paris Court Appeal ruled ( decision No 152/2019 ) in favour of the estate of late French photographer  Jean-François Bauret  in proceedings brought against,  inter alia , US artist  Jeff Koons  (an artist who, as readers will know, has been sued a  few  times for copyright infringement: see, eg,  here ,  here , and  here ).  The action related to the unauthorized reproduction of a photograph (Bauret’s ‘Enfants’, shown below on the left hand side) in a sculpture (Koons's ‘Naked’, below on the right hand side).  'Enfants' (L) and 'Naked' (R) The defendants had advanced a number of arguments, including that:  ‘Enfants’ is not original;  even if it was, ‘Naked’, would not incorporate any original elements thereof;  even if  prima facie  infringement was established, freedom of the arts and parody would prevail over copyright. The court rejected them all. Let’s see what h...

Latest French ruling causes agitation in the art world Among the areas of copyright harmonized at the EU level there is the so called 'droit de suite' (also known as 'resale right' or 'artist's resale royalty'), a creature at first typically belonging to  droit d'auteur , rather than common law copyright  [the UK, for instance, has only had it since 2001] , systems. The EU resale right By adopting  Directive 2001/84  (Resale Right Directive) EU legislature mandated  upon Member States  to "provide for the benefit of the author of an original work of art, a resale right, to be defined as an inalienable right, which cannot be waived, even in advance, to receive a royalty based on the sale price obtained for any resale of the work, subsequent to the first transfer of the work by the author."  [Article 1(1)] . In a nutshell, the resale right, as explained in the preamble to the directive: is meant to  enable authors/artists to r...

Adding layer after layer:  a lways a good idea? As readers will know, this blog has been following with some  passion  developments  leading to the introduction of new layers of protection - in the form of ancillary rights - over content displayed over the internet, eg through news aggregators.  Ancillary rights over news content In 2013 Germany adopted new provisions in its Copyright Act  ( sections  87f, 87g and 87h) that provide for the exclusive right of press publishers to exploit their contents commercially for one year, thus preventing search engines and news aggregators from  displaying non-irrelevant excerpts from newspaper articles without paying a fee.  As explained  here , the German initiative was aimed at recouping  some of the revenues that traditional news publishers have lost to the web. The underlying idea was that news aggregators like Google News would not really boost visits to newspaper we...

Facebook GIF button Thanks to Katfriend and scholar  Martin Husovec  (Tilburg University) this Kat has become  aware that, after  Facebook , also  Twitter  is on the move to introduce a dedicated GIF button (although for the moment it is only testing it on its mobile version). As most IPKat readers will know, a  GIF   [which stands for graphic interchange format and - importantly - must be  pronounced  with the same soft 'g' of 'gelato']  is "s omething between an emoticon and a video clip" and "l ooks like a short, slightly grainy video file that plays over and over again". Usually GIFs reproduce (very) short extracts of films or other likely-to-be-copyright-protected material, more-often-than-not for non-commercial purposes  [if you wish to create your own GIFs, learn how  here ] . This Kat is not aware of any specific decision on the copyright status of GIFs, although determining whether a GIF is something that ...