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Swedish Collective Management Organisation (STIM) and the Swedish Artists’ and Musicians’ Interest Organisation (SAMI) brought two separate proceedings against two companies that operate in the automobile leasing/renting industry. Both cases followed missed payment (since 2014) of yearly licensing fees to STIM and SAMI, and they are currently pending before the Swedish Supreme Court. This has now decided to stay the proceedings, and ask the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to clarify the scope of communication to the public in Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29 (InfoSoc Directive) and Article 8(2) of the Directive 2006/115 (the Rental Rights Directive).  The first case was brought by STIM against Fleetmanager, a company that leases vehicles, primarily to companies. The cars are equipped with built-in radio systems and are usually rented out to customers for a period of 29 days or less (short-term hire).  The second case was brought by SAMI against Nordisk Bilu...

IPKat has received breaking news that  t he Technical Board of Appeal (TBA) yesterday decided that recently amended Rule 28(2) EPC is in conflict with Art. 53(b) EPC as interpreted by the Enlarged Board of Appeal in G 2/12 (Broccoli/Tomato II). Further, a ccording to the Art. 164(2) EPC the Articles prevail, thus rending the R. 28 amendment void.  The case is yet another development in the on-going legal confusion on the issue of whether plant products produced by essential biological processes are patentable. Article 53(c) EPC excludes from patentablity processes for producing plants and animals by essentially natural processes. Rule 28(2) was recently added to extend this exclusion to plant products produced by essentially biological processes. The TBA yesterday ruled that new Rule 28(2) is incompatible with Article 53(b) as previously interpreted by the Enlarged Board of Appeal, and therefore void.  The decision was issued in oral proceedings yesterday for...

With the first self-driving vehicles (SDVs) likely to be commercially available by 2025, it seems that the transport revolution is nearly upon us.  Among the major players in this new emerging market, we have the established automotive firms investing in digital technologies, with an upcoming group of patent holders  specializing in  wireless communications and big data that are of crucial relevance to SDVs. The EPO published, in November 2018 a report entitled “Patents and self-driving vehicles” ( find it here ), which gives a very interesting overview of the patent landscape in this important emerging field. The patents and patent applications related to SDVs are divided into two main categories,  the automated vehicle sector and the smart environment sector. The former covers technologies that are embodied in the vehicle itself (such as enabling vehicles to make autonomous decisions), while the latter concerns technologies that allow SDVs to communicate with each ...

Pinocchio, arguably one of the first cases of AI, and his Kat Figaro   Artificial Intelligence and copyright: best friends, enemies, or ... frenemies? Find out by attending this new joint IPKat/ BLACA event, which will take place at London’s ReedSmith offices in the evening of Thursday, 10 January 2019. The event, which will be led by Gaetano Dimita (Queen Mary University of London) and myself, will start with talks by: Mark Grierson (UAL Creative Computing Institute) on the technical potential of AI creativity, and David Price (Google) on the relationship between copyright and text and data mining. The panel will discuss issues such as: Whether and to what extent copyright law can accommodate AI-created works; Whether the EU approach to text and data mining will support the development of and investments in AI in Europe; Whether human authors will and/or should be replaced by machines; The preferable regulatory approach to be pursued in Europe and in the UK, also post-Brexit. If...

Kat li ck nking Can linking to protected content be considered an infringement of IP rights, at certain conditions? As far as copyright is concerned, this is a question that - further to the decisions of the Court of Justice of the European (CJEU) in cases like Svensson   [Katposts here ] and GS Media [Katposts here ] - has a response in the affirmative in the EU. But is it possible that envisaging liability for acts of linking might be a violation of the link provider's own human rights, notably freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR)? This is the issue that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) had to consider in Magyar Jeti Zrt v Hungary .  Today, this court answered the question in the affirmative, at least in relation to linking to defamatory content. Let's see how the ECtHR reasoned, before turning to the potential implications for IP and, in particular, copyright. Background The applicant company, which operates ...

Revenge porn is sometimes mentioned in textbooks and commentary as the typical case of private production gone wrong, for which IP rights would prove useful not so much for incentivising the commercial dissemination of the ‘work’ but, rather, for its taking down. Such a scenario would certainly make for an interesting IP case, testing the application of copyright or performers’ rights, or at least serve as the basis of a cheeky examination question, no pun intended.  The Paris Tribunal recently decided   one   such case of ‘revenge porn’. At the risk of disappointing readers, there were no IP rights in sight in the dispute, the entire case having been (successfully) pled on the ground of the right to privacy. In a decision dated 20 November 2018 , the Paris Tribunal decided that a former mistress, who had leaked text messages and erotic photographs of the claimant to his wife and his sister, had breached his right to privacy guaranteed by Article 9 of the French Civil Co...