Category Europe
EU High Court Rules Against Digital Resale; We’ll Talk About This at the Conference
This week the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a landmark ruling that digitally downloaded files are not subject to exhaustion (the EU equivalent of first sale in U.S. law). This means that consumers don’t have the right to resell (or give away, lend, or rent) ebooks and other digital files. This […]
CJEU’s Advocate General Finds No Resale Right for Digital Files
The European Union’s highest court is likely to rule that, as with ReDigi in the U.S., it’s not legal to resell digital content files without the copyright owner’s permission.
Blockchain Applications for Music Enter the Bowling Alley
An interesting experiment in the use of blockchain technology was announced last week at the MIDEM music conference in Cannes, France. It involves the Israeli music blockchain startup Revelator, working with the music recognition service BMAT and the Finnish music collecting society Teosto. The application is payment of performance royalties to composers for radio airplay, […]
EU Article 13 (Now Article 17) Passes After More Changes, Making Copyright Filtering More Likely
The European Union’s copyright directive finally passed last week, with 56% of the European Parliament vote, after several rounds of significant changes to the text. On its way to final passage, the controversial Article 13 — now Article 17 — went through yet another round of changes that are worth discussing here. Two issues in […]
EU Parliament Approves Watered-Down Copyright Directive
This past Tuesday, the European Union Parliament approved a heavily amended version of the copyright reform legislation that has been generating much controversy over the past couple of years. We’ve been looking specifically at Article 13 of the proposed Directive, which has generated the most controversy for its inclusion of provisions that would require online services […]
Would Article 13 Give Copyright Owners What They Want?
Last week, the European Parliament moved the EU’s new Copyright Directive along in its legislative process; it passed out of the Legal Affairs Committee and is due for a plenary vote in September. One of the most controversial provisions of the new Directive is the forbodingly-named Article 13. Article 13 would require online services to […]
The Search for Leverage Against Sci-Hub (Updated)
I’m finally getting around to writing about Sci-Hub, the enormous and still-growing repository of scientific journal articles and academic papers that is often called “The Pirate Bay of Science.” The latest development in one of the lawsuits brought against the site in the United States finally brings a measure of technological interest to the legal […]
Readium LCP Set to Launch
The 2017 EPUB Summit in Brussels this past week was the venue for the beta launch and first live demos of the Readium LCP DRM technology for EPUB-formatted e-books. I’ve discussed aspects of the genesis and design of Readium LCP elsewhere: here is a summary that I presented at last year’s EPUB Summit in Bordeaux. […]
Sacem’s Partnership with IBM
IBM announced a deal with the French music rights collecting society Sacem last week to co-develop a new system called URights. The system is expected to launch by the end of this year, and the partnership will span ten years. The system will run on IBM’s cloud computing infrastructure and use IBM’s implementation of the […]
Dutch Public Libraries and the “One Copy, One User” Rule
I took a little bit of heat from certain members of the library community who were bothered by my analysis last week of the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ’s) decision in the case of Vereniging Openbare Bibliotheken (Dutch Public Library Association) v. Stichting Leenrecht (Lending Rights Foundation, the Dutch collecting society for royalties from library lending) […]
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