Copyright: WIPO. Photo: Emmanuel Berrod. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. WIPO negotiators appear prepared to approve a draft Broadcast Treaty that is no longer “signal-based” or limited to “traditional” (non-Internet-based) broadcasting.   There is a significant push at this week’s meetings of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights to approve a Diplomatic Conference on a Broadcasting Organizations Treaty that is not strictly limited to combating ..read more

Image generated with Midjourney In the middle of 2022, three significant AI text-to-image generators were made available to the public: Dall-E 2 (April 2022), Midjourney (July 2022), and Stability Diffusion (August 2022). In addition to raising questions about ownership of outputs, infringement in training, and the future of copyright as a policy tool to encourage creativity, economists are in the early stages of analysing the effects of these technologies on human creativity. These questions are interrelated as one argument in favour of copyright restrictions on training is the protection suc ..read more

“Artificial intelligence architecture” by Wendelin Jacober is marked with CC0 1.0. In the generative AI era, there is a proliferation of open source claims (i.e. operators that claim to release AI models sufficiently open to be part of the open source or open innovation movement, as opposed to closed-source model), such as open source and open access foundation models (e.g. Google BERT, Meta LLaMA Large Language Model (LLM), OpenAI API). While an open source approach to AI is valued as important for fostering innovation and competition, the notion raises many questions: (1) What is open source ..read more

Image by Grooveland Designs from Pixabay For 25 years, a case has been circling the German Courts like a roller coaster without a final decision. To date, the Federal Court (hereinafter “BGH”) alone has ruled on the matter five times. Now, it is in the hands of the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereinafter “CJEU”)– for the second time. We refer to none other than Pelham GmbH et al (Case C-590/23) (hereinafter “Pelham II“). It all began in 1999 when electronic music duo Kraftwerk sued Moses Pelham, a hip-hop producer, because the latter extracted a two-second sample from the song Meta ..read more

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash Welcome to the first trimester of the 2024 roundup of EU copyright law (though with a slight delay)! In this edition, we update you on what has happened between January and March 2024 in EU copyright law. Interestingly enough, in this issue you will find quite a bit of UK policy reports. As our regular readers know, this roundup series includes Court of Justice (CJEU) and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ (AG) opinions, and important policy developments. You can read the previous roundups here.     CJEU judgments and AG Opinions LEA, CJEU ..read more

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay The sweeping evolution of generative AI models is rapidly reshaping the legal landscape of copyright. In the wake of the landmark cases of Authors Guild, Inc v HathiTrust and Authors Guild, Inc v Google, Inc – or the Google Books case –, the fair use doctrine has accommodated a core principle of non-expressive use, referring to any act of reproduction that is not intended to enable human enjoyment, appreciation, or comprehension of the copied expression (see here). While the principle is premised on the age-old idea-expression dichotomy, whose roots stretch r ..read more

Art illustration generated using the Adobe Firefly Image 2 model with the following prompt: “Draw an art illustration with the forget-me-not flower as an illustration of memorisation in machine learning with matrix calculations in the background” Large language models’ (LLMs) greatest strength may also be their greatest weakness: their learning is so advanced that sometimes, just like humans, they memorise. This is not surprising, of course, because computers are really good at mainly two things: storing and analysing data.  There is now empirical evidence that deep learning models are pr ..read more

The Kurasov image is available here: Kurasov Tackling the blurred lines between counterfeiting and ingenuity in the art world is certainly not an easy endeavor. Indeed, in a world where “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed“, it is a rather daunting exercise for any court to draw the line between inspiration and imitation in copyrighted works, let alone in copyrighted art works. In January 2024, in an attempt to tackle this hot topic, the Cairo Economic Court handed renowned Egyptian graphic designer, Ghada Wali, a six-month imprisonment sentence and a hefty fine over ..read more

Photo by Christian Wiediger from Unsplash Part I of this annual post reporting on the copyright case law of the German Bundesgerichtshof covered decisions in the areas of copyright protection and exploitation rights, as well as exceptions and limitations. Part II will focus on copyright contract law and claims under copyright law.   IV.           Copyright contract law (Sections 31 et seqq. UrhG) 1. Adequate remuneration German copyright law stipulates that authors are entitled to appropriate remuneration for every use of their work (Secti ..read more

Photo by Christian Wiediger from Unsplash This article continues the tradition of reporting on the copyright case law of the German Bundesgerichtshof, the highest German civil court for copyright matters (Federal Court of Justice – “BGH”). This article summarises the most important BGH copyright decisions in 2022 as well as selected lower-court case law. Readers may find it useful to consult an English translation of the provisions of the German Copyright Act (Urheberrechtsgesetz – UrhG); an official translation may be found here. This article is divided into two parts. Part I covers decisions ..read more