A new set of regulations detailing small yet important changes to its copyright law have come into effect in the UK through the publication of the The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Research, Education, Libraries and Archives) Regulations 2014. This is part of a series of reforms that will be Read more…
Can you renounce to your copyright over a work? This simple question is the basis of a study undertaken by Yours Truly for WIPO. Most people I’ve asked the question tend to answer “of course!” It’s your work after all, and you can do anything you want with things you Read more…
The European Court of Justice has produced a very interesting ruling with regards to injunctions ordering intermediaries to block websites which make available infringing content. This has been a hot legal topic in recent years due to the strategy used by various content owners when attempting to tackle copyright infringement; Read more…
In a move that did not surprise Yours Truly, the unlicensed streaming service Popcorn Time was shut down by its developers a few days after it had gained notoriety. There was no reason why the site was removed, other than the developers needed to move on with their lives (after Read more…
The Court of Justice of the European Union has reached a decision in the latest case dealing with questions about whether linking to content amounts to a communication to the public, and therefore unauthorised linking could be pursued as copyright infringement. The case is Svensson and Others v Retriever Sverige Read more…
My friend and colleague Renata Avila has asked an interesting question on Twitter: “If the NSA is storing, reproducing – copying my data and works, are they violating Copyright Law?” I do not think that it has been asked before, so I am trying to tackle it today. This is Read more…
All of this week blogs and websites around the globe have been celebrating Copyright Week, an initiative by the EFF to celebrate two years of the defeat of SOPA/PIPA. Copyright Week consists of a series of articles analysing the future of copyright reform, showcased in a number of sites and Read more…
I finally managed to read the latest (and hopefully last) instalment of the long legal saga that is SAS Institute v World Programming Ltd. This has been an interesting yet long case that made it all the way to the European Court of Justice, and it deals with several questions Read more…
Wikileaks has published the IP chapter contained in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, a multilateral trade treaty negotiated between Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam. Several commentators have already started to make their initial analysis of what it contains, and I Read more…
Yours Truly is writing a report on voluntary copyright relinquishment and public domain dedications for WIPO. The terms of reference of the report can be found here. As part of the work, I thought that it would be a good idea to have an informal web survey to ask people Read more…