Source: http://ipkitten.blogspot.fi/2017/04/
Timestamp: 2017-06-24 05:14:11
Document Index: 466868241

Matched Legal Cases: ['CJEU ', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU\n', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU\n', 'CJEU ', 'CJEU ']

Never Too Late: If you missed the IPKat last week! This Kitten is delighted to bring you the 144th edition of Never Too Late!
IPKat Eleonora Rosati provides a useful checklist for determining whether a copyright exception established in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) applies to a specific case. Fujifilm v AbbVie: practice, procedure and policy analysis
Can the Royal Mint register SOVEREIGN as a trade mark for "gold commemorative coins"? The Royal Mint Ltd wanted to but the Commonwealth Mint & Philatelic Bureau Ltd was not impressed and opposed the application on the basis that "The word SOVEREIGN is ... widely recognised, as a word describing coins of a particular type and denomination that may be legal tender in any one of a number of different countries/territories." The Hearing Officer upheld the opposition and refused to register the mark on the basis of the absolute grounds for refusal set out in section 3(1)(c) and (d) of the Trade Marks Act 1994 ("the TMA"). In other words, the word "sovereign" when used for gold commemorative coins:
Whilst "Sovereign" can mean many different things to different people, in the world of coins it means a gold coin with a nominal value of £1 which is used for commemorative or trading purposes. A different sort of mint
This decision was made after hearing evidence from two experts in coinage - from the British Museum and Royal Mint Museum. The Hearing Officer didn't consider that either represented the average consumer (which he considered to be "traders in gold coins, such as banks and jewellers"). Therefore whilst they clearly knew a great deal about commemorative coins this did not help the Royal Mint. Newey J agreed that neither witness was an average consumer and that the Hearing Officer was entitled to discount their opinions. Indeed, Newey J agreed with the Hearing Officer's findings and upheld his decision in full.
"a small proportion of coins so-named [i.e. as 'sovereigns'] have been produced outside of RM's control" (paragraph 62) and "'sovereign' gold commemorative coins from, at least, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Gibraltar and/or Australia are also available in the UK" (paragraph 77). In fact, while sovereign coins from jurisdictions other than the United Kingdom commonly bear the word "sovereign", United Kingdom sovereigns hardly ever have, and RM's promotional material usually involves "the designation 'sovereign' [being] used in association with the name Royal Mint" (paragraph 34 of the Decision).
trade mark; trademarks,
In the world of media, the mantra for over a generation has been— “pity the poor daily print newspaper”, which became the poster child for media disruption in the on-line world. With much news, once provided by newspapers now available free on-line, reader subscriptions have declined, leading to a drop in advertising revenues, resulting in staff cut-backs and less content, leading to a further drop in subscribers, and so on. No one in the media industry has stood more in contrast to the newspapers than the sports broadcasting business, and no company within sports broadcasting has cast a larger shadow than ESPN. Owned by Disney, ESPN has been perhaps the major source of steady revenues for the Disney empire. While the commercial fortunes of Disney’s creative content offerings ebb and flow, ESPN has provided consistent and respectable revenues. After all, the contents of sports broadcasts are unique. They must be consumed in real time (who wants to watch yesterday’s football match?), the demographics are an advertiser’s dream, and the exclusive nature of broadcasting rights promises to bring top dollar contracts between the broadcaster and the various sports leagues. The diminishing number of newspaper reporters, virtually unknown to the wider public, drink coffee from plastic cups and operate in tiny cubicles; sports broadcasters sit in fancy studios and present to tens of millions of viewers, all the while projecting a sense of understated in-studio cool. Pity the poor newspapers and their staff, another example of an “oh-so-yesterday” form of media with an outdated business model.
For ESPN, the Teflon ceased to be effective in the face of two factors. First, ESPN had entered into humongous deals to acquire broadcasting rights for various sports, such as the National Football League (eight years, $15.2 billion dollars) and the National Basketball Association (nine years, $12 billion dollars). Of course, no one forced ESPN to agree to such amounts; presumably, it did the calculations and came away convinced that the sums were reasonable. However, in so doing, ESPN seems to have misread where consumer viewer habits were going in the face of changing communication platforms. In a manner not dissimilar to the failure of the print media to correctly understand the implications of internet connectivity for disrupting traditional newspaper reading habits, ESPN misgauged the durability of cable as the preferred sports viewing platform. In a word, viewers are more and more “cutting the cable”, in part, due to increasing resistance to the multi-channel, bundle acquisition cable model and the seemingly ever-increasing cable subscription fees; in part, due to the increasing popularity of streaming as an alternative channel of distribution. The result is a commercially deadly combination of increasing expenses and declining revenues from both subscriptions and advertising. Indeed, the Disney cable networks division experienced an 11% decline in operating income for its most recent quarter, as compared to the same quarter a year ago, all of which is due to a drop at ESPN. Locked into huge, long-term licensing fees, perhaps the only material way to improve bottom line, at least in the short-term, is to cut from somewhere, and that “somewhere” are the “on-air” personalities, many of whom have been with ESPN for some time. (In 2015, ESPN had laid off some 300 employees, but most of them were “off camera” types.)
Photo at left by Eleassar Photo on bottom right by Tanya Dropbear
lay-offs of on-camera presenters,
Yesterday this blog reported that
the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has issued yet another
long-awaited judgment, this being the decision in Filmspeler, C-527/15.
writing, the text of the ruling was not yet available. Now that it is and
having had a chance to read it, it seems to me that – despite its highly
specific factual background (sale of multimedia players enabling free access to
audiovisual works protected by copyright without the consent of the
rightholders) - Filmspeler is a MAJOR copyright decision.
· First, because the Court relaxed the notion of what amounts to an
‘indispensable intervention [the judgment does not even contain
a reference to the intervention being ‘indispensable’] for the sake
of the right of communication to the public within Article 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive. This means – as I also suggested in this article on GS Media written for Common Market Law Review – that a
broader group of defendants might be now regarded as primarily liable for
unauthorized acts of communication to the public.
· Secondly, because the Court held that streaming unlicensed content
can amount to copyright infringement, on consideration that the mandatory
exemption for temporary copies within Article 5(1) of the InfoSoc Directive
would not be applicable. This paves the way to holding not only those who
provide unlawful streams, but also viewers of
such streams, liable for copyright infringement.
Let’s take a closer look at both
Construing the right of communication to the public:yes, but where to start, wonders Bubi?
The first issue for the Court to
address was whether the concept of ‘communication to the public’ must be
interpreted as covering the sale of a multimedia player on which there are
pre-installed add-ons, available on the internet, containing hyperlinks to
websites - that are freely accessible to the public - on which
copyright-protected works have been made available to the public without the
consent of the rightholders.
As usual, the CJEU recalled at the
outset that the right of communication to the public, which is preventive in
nature, must be interpreted broadly. This is so in order to fulfill one of the
objectives of the InfoSoc Directive, ie to grant authors a ‘high level of
Provided that an act of
communication to the public requires (1) an act of communication directed (2)
to a public, what actually amounts to an act of communication to the public
also requires an individual assessment and taking into account
several complementary criteria. These – as the CJEU noted in GS Media – are not autonomous and are
interdependent, and must be applied both individually and in their interaction
with one another. At para 31 of the Filmspeler decision the Court recalled that among such criteria, there is “the essential role played by the
user. The user makes an act of communication when he intervenes, in full
knowledge of the consequences of his action, to give access to a protected work
to his customers and does so, in particular, where, in the absence of that
intervention, his customers would not, in principle, be able to enjoy the
broadcast work”.
remember that in his Opinion in GS Media, Advocate General (AG) Wathelet [here] had
embraced a narrow understanding of what amount to such an ‘essential
role’/’indispensable intervention’. The AG held the view that links posted on a
website that direct to copyright works freely
accessible on another website cannot be classified as an ‘act of communication’:
the operator of the website that posts the hyperlinks is not indispensable to
making available of the works in
question to users. The CJEU did not go as far as AG Wathelet. However, it ‘limited’
liability for linking to unlicensed content to the situations in which [see further here]:
· The defendant has knowledge that the content linked to is unlicensed and no defence is
available to him;
· The defendant operates for profit, so that he is presumed to have
knowledge of the lawful/unlawful character of the content linked to, and he
fails to rebut such presumption;
An indispensable intervention to allow access
Filmspeler is different. Although
possibly a natural evolution of GS Media and preceding case law, it seemingly broadens
the framework of liability. This is essentially because the intervention needed
to fall within the scope of Article 3(1) does not require to be strictly
indispensable: mere facilitation seems enough. The Court excluded that the sale of
a multimedia player could be regarded as akin to the mere provision of physical
facilities [this
is outside the scope of Article 3(1), as Recital 27 in the preamble to the
InfoSoc Directive clarifies], and concluded that the communication
at hand to would be to a ‘public’.
With regard to the former, the Court
noted that “intervention enabling a direct link to be established between
websites broadcasting counterfeit works and purchasers of the multimedia
player, without which the purchasers would find it difficult to benefit from
those protected works, is quite different from the mere provision of physical
facilities … [I]t is clear … that the
streaming websites at issue in the main proceedings are not readily
identifiable by the public and the majority of them change frequently.” [41]
Turning to the notion of ‘public’,
the court held that there is a ‘public’ if a number (above de minimis) of persons purchases or may acquire the multimedia
player in succession and has an internet connection [44 and 45; so potentially this means ‘anyone’].
The CJEU also noted that in this case the works would be communication to a
‘new public’. [47]
Having established that in the case
at hand there would be a communication to a new public, the CJEU turned to GS
Media, and noted that: (1) the defendant has knowledge that the content linked
to is unlawful [50];
(2) the defendant has a profit-making intention.
will remember that in GS Media the CJEU
failed to provide guidance on how the profit-making intention criterion should
be assessed: should one consider whether the relevant link is provided with the
intention to make a profit? Or should rather one consider the surrounding
environment to the relevant link, eg whether it is provided on a website that
is operated for profit? Although
both alternatives appear plausible, consideration of the context in which the
relevant link is provided appears to be more in line with earlier CJEU case law
and, now, Filmspeler. In both SGAE and FAPL, in fact, the Court considered that the profit-making nature
of the communication was apparent from the fact that the defendants transmitted
the relevant works in their own establishment (hotels and a public house,
respectively) in order to benefit therefrom and to attract customers to whom
the works transmitted are of interest. Similarly, in Filmspeler the profit-making intention subsists because “the multimedia player is supplied
with a view to making a profit, the price for the multimedia player being paid
in particular to obtain direct access to protected works available on streaming
websites without the consent of the copyright holders … [T]he main attraction
of such a multimedia player for potential purchasers lies precisely in the fact
that add-ons are pre-installed on it which enable users to gain access to sites
on which copyright-protected films are made available without the consent of
the copyright holders.” [51]
topical, issue to address was whether the streaming of unlicensed content could
result in liability infringement of the right of reproduction or could
be, instead, excused under the exemption for temporary copies within Article
5(1) of the InfoSoc Directive.
readers know, the exemption within Article 5(1) is subject to five cumulative
conditions that must be interpreted strictly: (1) the act of reproduction is temporary; (2) it is transient or incidental; (3) it is an integral and essential part of a technological process; (4) the sole purpose of that process is to enable a transmission in a
network between third parties by an intermediary or a lawful use of a work or
protected subject matter; and (5) that act does not have any independent economic significance.
In addition, Article 5(1) is subject to the three-step
test in Article 5(5). The CJEU held that the acts of reproduction at issue do not relate to a lawful use of
copyright works, also because the main attraction of Filmspeler’s player is the
pre-installation of the add-ons. In addition, and as a consequence, the
resulting temporary acts of reproduction are such as to adversely affect the
normal exploitation of those works and causes unreasonable prejudice to the
legitimate interests of the right holder [71].
the background proceedings in Filmspeler relate to a very specific factual
background, so I expected that the resulting CJEU decision could have limited
construction of communication to the public, two main aspects are worth noting.
facilitation is seemingly akin to intervention, which arguably does not even
need to be ‘indispensable’. This makes me think when the CJEU decides Ziggo, it will follow AG Szpunar [here] and
hold that a subject like The Pirate Bay makes acts of communication to the public, and is primarily liable for copyright infringement. In the immediate aftermath of the AG Opinion in Ziggo and the CJEU
decision in Filmspeler some commentators have submitted that the CJEU has de facto harmonised
secondary liability, ie an area of copyright that has not been formally harmonized at
the EU level. That might be true, but it is important to note that not all EU
Member States envisage a secondary liability regime for copyright infringement.
aspect is that after Filmspeler it should be clear that one’s own profit-making
intention should be appreciated in relation to the context, ie surrounding
environment, in which the allegedly infringing act takes place, rather than whether the actual
act of infringement is motivated by a profit-making intention. This, as seen from the early national applications of GS Media (particularly in Sweden and Germany), should broaden the situations of prima facie infringement.
liability for unlawful streaming, just a few weeks ago the Derbyshire Council Trading Standards in the UK submitted
that streaming unlicensed content would not give rise to liability. After Filmspeler, this does no longer seem true.
Although there might be a discussion as to whether
the acts of reproduction are actually made by the viewer (rather than the site
that hosts the stream), it appears that now the case of unlawful streams is
fully comparable to that of unlawful downloads. In fact, the reasoning of the
CJEU in Filmspeler closely resembles
that in ACI Adam [Katposts here], ie the case concerning whether unlawful downloads of copyright works could be covered by the private copying exception.
All in all, Filmspeler is a very good victory for
rightholders: this is so as far as their enforcement efforts are concerned, but
also in relation to lobbying work at various levels – notably the EU and the
drafting of a ‘value gap’ provision.