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Copyright is not the simplest of intellectual property rights and when you add licensing to the mix the combination of contract and competition law plus cross border questions can provide complex considerations for even the most experienced practitioner. Cross-Border Copyright Licensing: Law and Practice , edited by Carlo Scollo Lavizzari and Rene Viljoen aims to guide you through some of these complexities, particularly as they relate to China, the EU, India, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, South Africa and the US. The book gives a handy and comprehensive overview of the legal issues to consider when licensing copyright in each territory. This includes the approach of the national courts to important questions such as jurisdiction and choice of law. More practical considerations such as collecting societies are considered as well as related rights such as image rights, moral rights and performers rights. In some cases, other rights such as patents get a special mention, particularly where ...

Have you ever found yourself clicking-- ‘Yes I agree to these terms & conditions’, without actually reading them? Probably yes [everyone does it…even lawyers] . Did that include your registration with Twitter? If so, you may not have realized that you agreed to a licence allowing Twitter (and its partners) to use at will any of the copyright-protected content you created and uploaded on their site. But not to worry, the Paris Tribunal, in a 236-page-long decision, "righted wrongs" last month by going over Twitter’s terms and conditions with a [very] fine-tooth coomb (see for the decision in French language: Tribunal de Grande Instance, Décision du 07 août 2018, 1/4 social N° RG 14/07300 ). The tribunal’s review declared ‘null and void’ most of the clauses challenged by the claimant, including the contract’s copyright licensing provisions for user-generated content.  Users are consumers, Twitter is not ‘free’ The case was brought before the Paris Tribunal by the French ...

Uber changed the way the taxi industry worked; Airbnb had a similar impact on holiday lets and rentals. It is now the turn of the creative industries, often called the copyright industries, with online platforms going by names such as Quidjob , Upwork , PeopleForHour or Fiverr . And yes, ‘Fiverr’ hints at the fact that you may be able to commission and ‘buy’ creative content for… a ‘fiver’ (read -- five dollars, five pounds, five euros etc.).  But commissioning bespoke creative content is not as simple as ordering a taxi ride because it inevitably involves the transfer of intellectual property rights. As a result, these platforms have the potential to not only disrupt how creative works are made (the creative industries) but also to impact on entire fields of law (copyright and performers’ rights). The ‘Fiverrization’ of the creative industries and intellectual property rights may be around the corner. Uber/Fiverr: same concept Platforms such as Uber or AirBnB are based on the same...