On 26 March 2019 the EU Parliament voted to pass the draft Copyright Directive (“Directive”) into EU law.  After adoption by the EU Council (representatives of Member State governments) and official publication, the EP’s adopted text will become EU law. Member States will then have until mid-2021 to implement it into their national laws. DSM Watch has already overviewed the whole Directive here, and looked at Article 11 on a new press publishers’ right (re-numbered Article…

Yesterday (26 March 2019) the EU Parliament voted to pass the draft Copyright Directive into EU law.  After adoption by the EU Council (representatives of Member State governments) and official publication, the EP’s adopted text will become EU law. Member States will then have until mid-2021 to implement it into their national laws. DSM Watch has already overviewed the whole Directive here, and looked at Article 13 on liability of user-uploaded content services (re-numbered Article…

Today the EU Parliament voted to pass the draft Copyright Directive into EU law.  After adoption by the EU Council (representatives of Member State governments) and official publication, it will become EU law.   Member States will then have until mid-2021 to implement it into their national laws.   Despite substantial opposition from blocks of MEPs and the large numbers of the general public, the final text does include the controversial press publishers’ right (Article 11) and content…

Agreement on a compromise text for the new Copyright Directive was reached between Member State government representatives, EU Parliament representatives and the EU Commission last week (see our “Breakthrough” post). On 20 February 2019, EU Governments formally voted, by a majority, to approve that compromise text: Italy, Poland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Finland opposed it; Belgium and Slovenia abstained.   However, it is not yet law despite some headlines which one may see in the…

On 1 July the European Commission adopted an action plan to address infringements of intellectual property rights in the EU (COM(2014) 392/2). The action plan intends to shift the attention of enforcement policies and actions from individuals infringing IP rights towards commercial scale infringers as they are viewed as the most harmful according to the Commission. The EU Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, Michel Barnier commented on the new plan stating: “Rather than penalising…

The Court of Appeal of Bremen (German version of the decision) has recently confirmed that competitors and consumer associations in Germany may challenge non-compliances with e-commerce rules. Any such non-compliance can be attacked on the basis of the German Unfair Competition Act (“UWG”). The court dealt with two essential aspects of E-Commerce: 1. Is it a misleading advertisement to offer products if the delivery period is unspecified, namely uses the word “expected” (1-3…

The Court of Appeal of Munich had to decide about two main aspects concerning entries in internet forums: Could such blog- or Wikipedia-entries be classified as commercial activity and therefore be subject to the German Law on unfair Competition (UWG)? And if it is possible to regard these entries as commercial activity must they be classified as misleading advertisement? (Court of Appeal of Munich, decision of 10.05.2012 – 29 U 515/12). At first, the…