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Merpel celebrated Halloween in Florence Together with Spain   [Katpost  here ] , this week it has been Italy’s turn to transpose the   DSM Directive   into its own law. Next week, the   Legislative Decree   approved by the Council of Ministers will be published on the Italian Official Journal ( Gazzetta Ufficiale ). During the summer, The IPKat  discussed  the content of some of the most ‘interesting’ draft provisions that Italy was considering adopting to implement the Directive into its own law. The final text of the Italian Legislative Decree does not substantially depart from that draft legislation. Let’s take a closer look at of some of the provisions – online content sharing service providers (OCSSPs), text and data mining (TDM), press publishers’ right – eventually adopted and see what mark the new Italian provisions may deserve from the perspective of compliance with their EU counterparts – respectively: Articles 17, 3-4, and 15 of the Dir...

Beach + sunbathing + copyright = the perfect summer As readers with an interest in EU copyright are well aware, EU Member States had time until 7 June to  transpose the   DSM Directive 2019/790   [Katposts  here ]   into their own national laws. With a few exceptions  [see Communia tracker  here ] , because of a number of reasons - ranging from COVID to the delayed  Article 17 Commission's guidance   [Katpost  here ]  to some important pending rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the majority of EU Member States missed this deadline. This said, based on what is already available, it is apparent that the provisions that the EU legislature adopted in 2019 to establish a ‘Digital Single Market’ will be implemented in different – if not altogether creative – ways across the EU. It is true that there are provisions in the Directive that leave Member States significant discretion. Such discretion ranges from the v...

Rodarte S/S 2019 Yesterday  The New York Times  published  a very interesting article  by fashion expert Vanessa Friedman, which praises the spring/summer 2019 collections presented by  Telfar  and  Rodarte  during New York Fashion Week, as being about fashion that consumers do not really know they want yet.  Apparently it has become commonplace for fashion houses to produce garments that consumers already want. As explained by Friedman,  There’s a lot of pressure these days to design by algorithm. We know too much about buying habits and likes, and the result is an insidious bias toward giving people what they have already indicated they want. It may be safe, and easier to sell, but it’s antithetical to the whole point of fashion, which should be about giving people what they never knew they wanted — what they couldn’t imagine they wanted — until they saw it. But how is all this 'profiling' done? It will not c...

If only all mining activities were these cheerful! A few days ago this blog  reported  that Irish Government has recently proposed the introduction into Irish law (new section 53A of the Copyright Act) of a  copyright exception  for text and data mining (TDM). From an EU standpoint, the most interesting aspects of the Irish proposal are probably the following: First, its timing: while it is true that a TDM exception was first proposed in the 2013  Modernising Copyright  Report , an actual initiative of that Member State's Government comes at a time when discussion is well underway to introduce a mandatory TDM exception at the EU level  [Article 3 of the Proposal for a  Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market   - on the EU proposal see further  here  and  here ] .  Secondly, the different scope of the Irish exception  [which would be derived from Article 5(3)(a) of the  InfoSoc Directive ] ...

Readers may recall that back in 2013 the Irish Review Committee released a very interesting report, aimed at  Modernising Copyright  in this EU Member State  [see  here ,  here ,  here ,  here ,  here ] .  Moving from the realisation (or rather wish?) that  " Copyright reform is in the air ", the Report recommended a number of changes to the Irish copyright framework as embodied in the  2000 Copyright Act , including an ambitious  proposal to introduce a tightly drawn Irish fair use exception  (holding that this possibility would not be prevented by the system of exceptions and limitations in the  InfoSoc Directive ), and a  specific exception for linking and marshalling   [all this occurred while the CJEU  Svensson  decision - Katposts on linking  here  - was pending, and it was not entirely clear whether linking could qualify as an act of communication to the public] . After the Re...

Kat-mining At the time of unveiling its  Digital Single Market Strategy in May 2015 , the EU Commission linked the establishment of a fully connected digital single market to the objective of creating a favourable environment for European start-ups and SMEs. With specific regard to copyright, however, it soon appeared that start-ups and SMEs were not really part of the picture as far as Commission’s action in this area of the law is concerned. In this sense, the  proposal for a directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market , which was released in September 2016, is a telling example. The content of the proposed text and data mining exception The draft provisions intended to remedy the so called ‘value gap’ (Article 13) and establish a new right for press publishers (Article 11) have been extensively criticized for – among other things – having the potential to raise barriers to entry in the markets for, respectively, hosting platforms and news aggregato...