intellectual property | In Principle

If a rental car is equipped with a radio, should the rental company pay royalties to a collective rights management organisation? The Court of Justice recently addressed this issue.

14 listopada 2018 r. Parlament Europejski przyjął nowelizację dyrektywy o audiowizualnych usługach medialnych („dyrektywa AUM”). Jedną z głównych zmian jest wprowadzenie definicji usługi platformy udostępniania wideo. Kto może zostać uznany za dostawcę takiej platformy i z czym się to wiąże?

The CJEU held that a company that only stores goods without knowing they are counterfeits does not infringe trademarks. So can logistics operators sleep easy? Not really.

The rapid boom in cleaning products suggested that this could be a sector where the first coronavirus-related IP disputes might arise. And so it has proved.

Genuine use of a trademark in the EU as a whole may be proved in certain circumstances by showing use of the mark in a single member state.

Are computer games still a niche product, or have they entered the mainstream? The possibility of registering a trademark similar to an earlier mark turns on this issue.

A person’s image, in the sense of a physical picture of an individual, is subject to protection as a personality right and as personal data. The rule under Art. 81 of the Polish Copyright Act is that a person whose image is fixed must consent to dissemination of the image. Fixation of an image includes capturing of the whole or part of a person’s profile, through any means—photo, film, drawing, painting, or portrait—enabling identification of the person. Dissemination of an image means any form of publication, i.e. making it accessible to an unlimited set of recipients, as in the case of media access. It is irrelevant whether use of the image is aimed at generating financial gain.

Liability for content published on the internet infringing for example personal interests, industrial property rights or copyright may be imposed not only on the author of the content, but also on the administrator of the site where it was published.

Whisper marketing is nothing new. Customers, especially younger ones, will lean toward a purchase if the good or service is recommended by a friend or someone they trust. They treat traditional advertising with increasing distance and scepticism.

Catchphrases are intriguing not only as a phenomenon of social communication. They can also develop an economic dimension if they have marketing appeal. Consumers eagerly purchase T-shirts and gadgets decorated with amusing sayings, as a medium for expressing their own personality and preferences. What counts in this situation is to be the first to register the phrase.

Dissemination of people’s images is an essential ingredient of the media, both traditional and new. In an audiovisual work, the absence of human images strips the scene of human characters, and without them the media impact is lost. Under the applicable regulations, as a rule there is a duty to obtain the permission of the person whose image is presented, but consent is not required when the image of an individual constitutes only a detail of a larger whole such as a gathering, landscape, or public event. This distinction seems understandable and even intuitive, but how should it be applied in practice? The answer is not so obvious, and requires more extensive analysis.

Internet users don’t need to be told what a meme is. But for the sake of order, according to Merriam-Webster, a meme in this sense is defined as “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.” Memes have found a home in virtual reality, not only in sites especially devoted to memes but also in social media and news sites, where memes are often used to illustrate comments on current political events.