sutton044

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...

Exhaustion is the hot Brexit topic du jour. Regardless of the industry, changes to the exhaustion regime are set to affect everyone in ways both predictable and unpredictable. This Kat has had lots of messages from friends in very different sectors wondering what on earth exhaustion of rights could mean and why everyone is so worried about it. The note goes some way toward answering both questions. What is exhaustion? The guidance note has this helpful explanation: The exhaustion of IP rights refers to the loss of the right to control distribution and resale of that product after it has been placed on the market within a specified territory by, or with the permission of, the right holder. A parallel import is a non-counterfeit product which is imported into a country where the intellectual property rights in that product have already been exhausted. The UK is currently part of a regional European Economic Area (EEA) exhaustion scheme, meaning that IP rights are considered exhausted onc...