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Miguel Ángel Perera Díaz in a  faena A bullfight (in Spanish:  corrida ; the final stages are called  faena ) is a contest that involves a bullfighter (a  matador ) and a bull, in which the former seeks to subdue, immobilize or kill the animal in accordance with a set of rules. The best-known type of bullfighting is the  Spanish-style one , which has been traditionally regarded as both a sport and performance art. In relation to the latter qualification of bullfighting, a question that has recently arisen is whether a bullfight might be regarded as a work protectable under copyright law. The Spanish Supreme Court  answered this question in the negative  last month, when it delivered its judgment in a longstanding copyright saga, which had first begun after a well-known Spanish matador,  Miguel Ángel Perera Díaz , was refused registration – by the Extremadura Copyright Registry – of a  faena  of his. Background The bullfight in quest...

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...

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 Brompto...

Is a functional shape eligible for copyright protection under the  InfoSoc Directive ? This, in a nutshell, is the intriguing issue that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has been asked to address in  Brompton Bicycle , C-833/18 . As readers might guess, the shape at issue in this case is Brompton's iconic foldable bike, originally created in 1975 and sold in its current form since 1987: This morning, Advocate General (AG) Campos Sánchez-Bordona issued his  Opinion . He advised the Court to rule that, if the shape is  exclusively  dictated by the technical function of the relevant product, then no copyright subsists in it.  Whilst this conclusion appears reasonable and in line with existing CJEU case law, including - most recently - the  Cofemel  decision  [ here ; for a recent application, see  here ] , the Opinion appears to go a bit astray from that, at least in one notable respect (read on)....

IPKat-approved jacquard fabric Yesterday, the  Intellectual Property Enterprise Court  (IPEC, a specialist court which is part of the Business and Property Courts of the High Court of Justice of England and Wales) issued what appears to be the first UK decision tackling the implications of the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in  Cofemel , C-683/17   [see  here ;  Cofemel  was also awarded the prestigious  Kat-award 'Copyright Decision of the Year 2019' ] . It is the decision in  Response Clothing Ltd v The Edinburgh Woollen Mill Ltd  [2020] EWHC 148 (IPEC) (29 January 2020) . Background The claimant, Response, is a clothing company; the defendant, EWM, is a major retailer of clothing with about 400 stores in the UK. Between 2009 and 2012, Response supplied EWM with ladies tops made of a  jacquard fabric  of a design referred to as a 'wave arrangement'. In 2012, Response attempt...

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...