So, the long-running legal saga starring a photographer, a monkey and an animal rights organisation has finally come to an end when both parties (not the monkey) have reached a settlement. While it is not common to learn the particulars of such an agreement, lawyers for PETA have said that […]
Shutterstock Andres Guadamuz, University of Sussex When a group of museums and researchers in the Netherlands unveiled a portrait entitled The Next Rembrandt, it was something of a tease to the art world. It wasn’t a long lost painting but a new artwork generated by a computer that had analysed […]
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has made a very important decision in the case of Stichting Brein v Ziggo (C‑610/15), which involves blocking access to The Pirate Bay (TPB) and the legal nature of torrent files. This case follows a CJEU decision on multimedia players containing […]
The newspaper industry in in disarray because of the Internet, old business models are no longer working, and media empires need to contest with a changed environment. There are two ways of addressing the challenges ahead, to change business models, or to hire an army of lobbyists and lawyers to […]
There is an interesting copyright case brewing online. Cyriak Harris is a British freelance video animator, famous for creating surreal videos involving cute animals that are then transformed in often nightmarish ways (my favourite is Kitty City). In 2010 he produced a video of dancing cows that went viral (as […]
The BBC has announced that it will drop its online website for recipes in an effort to generate savings. This has raised quite a few eyebrows, with the hashtag #bbcrecipes currently the top UK trending topic on Twitter. This has prompted a very interesting legal discussion, can recipes be subject […]
A very interesting case has been developing this week to highlight several issues surrounding the DMCA take-down procedure, and the protection of copyright story elements such as plot, story and dialogue. The case involves the YouTube channel of Spanish geek vlogger Frikidoctor, which seems to specialise in Game of Thrones […]
At 7 seconds, this happy llama is thankfully not infringing.* How much do you need to reproduce a video or broadcast in order to infringe copyright? In the age of Vine, Periscope and animated gifs, this question has become more important than ever. We now may have a partial answer […]
A judge in California has dismissed a copyright case brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), where the animal rights organisation claimed that it represented the monkey that took the famous selfie depicted above. The case is that of Naruto v Slater, where PETA sued British photographer […]
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the EU is not about to make linking illegal. The bad news is that the latest proposal from the EU Commission leaves open the door for the creation of an ancillary copyright that would affect the way in […]