Not for designers: on the inadequacies of EU design law and how to fix it

Design rights represent an interesting example of how the EU legislature has successfully regulated an otherwise heterogeneous field of law. Yet this type of protection is not for all. The tools created by EU intervention have been drafted paying much more attention to the industry sector rather than to designers themselves. In particular, modern, digitally based, individual or small-sized, 3D printing, open designers and their needs are largely neglected by such legislation. The use of printing machinery to manufacture physical objects created digitally thanks to computer programs such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software has been in place for quite a few years, and it is actually the standard in many industrial fields, from aeronautics to home furniture. The change in recent years that has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting factor is a combination between the popularization of such technologies (price, size, usability, quality) and the diffusion of a culture based on access to and reuse of knowledge. We will call this blend Open Design. It is probably still too early, however, to say whether 3D printing will be used in the future to refer to a major event in human history, or instead will be relegated to a lonely Wikipedia entry similarly to “Betamax” (copyright scholars are familiar with it for other reasons). It is not too early, however, to develop a legal analysis that will hopefully contribute to clarifying the major issues found in current EU design law structure, why many modern open designers will probably find better protection in copyright, and whether they can successfully rely on open licenses to achieve their goals. With regard to the latter point, we will use Creative Commons (CC) licenses to test our hypothesis due to their unique characteristic to be modular, i.e. to have different license elements (clauses) that licensors can choose in order to adapt the license to their own needs

The protection of sports events in the EU: Property, intellectual property, unfair competition and special forms of protection

This article analyses some of the legal tools available to organisers of sporting events under EU law and the law of EU Member States. The focus is on remedies based on property rights and contracts, as well as on intellectual property, unfair competition rules and so called “special” forms of protection. As it is well known, in fact, following the ECJ ruling in Premier League v. QC Leisure, sporting events as such do not qualify as works under EU copyright law. Nevertheless, the article shows that remedies based on both traditional and new forms of property, IP and cognate rights can still offer adequate protection to sports organisers. First, many sports events take place in dedicated venues on which sports organisers can claim exclusive use rights and thereupon develop conditional access agreements (i.e. “house right”). Second, the recording and broadcast of sporting events may give rise to a variety of intellectual property rights, especially in the field of copyright and related rights. Third, unfair competition rules, and in particular misappropriation doctrines, have been invoked to protect sporting activities from unauthorised copying. Fourth, special forms of protection have recently been devised at the national level in order to offer an additional layer of rights protecting sports organisers. The article argues that even in the absence of a dedicated EU harmonised right tailored to sports events, the current legal framework is well equipped to offer protection to the investments that the sport industry is making in this sector. The article also argues that national initiatives in the field have so far proven of little practical relevance and, as a matter of fact, have the potential to clash with the general EU legal framework. There is only one area that escapes this rule: a right to use sporting events data to organise betting activities, or in other words, a right to consent to bets. The article concludes that if such a right is to be recognised, it is not the field of intellectual property, nor even property in general, the most appropriate area of law at which to look

Free-libre open source software as a public policy choice

Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is characterised by a specific programming and development paradigm. The availability and freedom of use of source code are at the core of this paradigm, and are the prerequisites for FLOSS features. Unfortunately, the fundamental role of code is often ignored among those who decide the software purchases for Canadian public agencies. Source code availability and the connected freedoms are often seen as unrelated and accidental aspects, and the only real advantage acknowledged, which is the absence of royalty fees, becomes paramount. In this paper we discuss some relevant legal issues and explain why public administrations should choose FLOSS for their technological infrastructure. We also present the results of a survey regarding the penetration and awareness of FLOSS usage into the Government of Canada. The data demonstrates that the Government of Canada shows no enforced policy regarding the implementation of a specific technological framework (which has legal, economic, business, and ethical repercussions) in their departments and agencies

Deep pockets, packets, and harbours

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is a set of methodologies used for the analysis of data flow over the Internet. It is the intention of this paper to describe technical details of this issue and to show that by using DPI technologies it is possible to understand the content of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol communications. This communications can carry public available content, private users information, legitimate copyrighted works, as well as infringing copyrighted works. Legislation in many jurisdictions regarding Internet service providers’ liability, or more generally the liability of communication intermediaries, usually contains “safe harbour” provisions. The World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty of 1996 has a short but significant provision excluding liability for suppliers of physical facilities. The provision is aimed at communication to the public and the facilitation of physical means. Its extensive interpretation to cases of contributory or vicarious liability, in absence of specific national implementation, can prove problematic. Two of the most relevant legislative interventions in the field, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the European Directive on Electronic Commerce, regulate extensively the field of intermediary liability. This paper looks at the relationship between existing packet inspection technologies, especially the ‘deep version,’ and the international and national legal and regulatory interventions connected with intellectual property protection and with the correlated liabilities ‘exemptions. In analyzing the referred two main statutes, we will take a comparative look at similar interventions in Australia and Canada that can offer some interesting elements of reflection

Creative Commons Licenses: empowering open access

No abstract available

Information Guide: Introduction to Ownership of Rights in Research Data. CREATe, University of Glasgow, 2018

No abstract available

Information Guide: Making Research Data Available. CREATe, University of Glasgow, 2018

No abstract available

Choose the Right Rights, Use the Data Right

On Thursday 2nd November, the University of Glasgow Research Information Management Services Team, Jisc, and CREATe held an all-day workshop on licencing research datasets. The purpose of the workshop was to draw out issues around licencing of research datasets with a focus on identifying whether clarifications in terminology and guidance would be useful

Information Guide: FAQ: Using Research Data. CREATe, University of Glasgow, 2018

No abstract available

Re-use of public sector information in cultural heritage institutions

In 2013 the European Union amended the Directive on Public Sector Information, establishing the principle that all available information produced and collected by public sector institutions must be made available for reuse under open terms and conditions. The amended Directive also brings publicly funded libraries, museums and archives into its scope. These new rules on reuse of heritage materials, treated as public sector information (PSI), attempt for the first time to define a general framework for sharing cultural heritage information all around Europe. In this paper we argue that if Member States are not careful, the implementation of the changes required by the new Directive could do more harm than good when it comes to access to digitized cultural heritage in Europe. These concerns center on how the directive interacts with copyright legislation. The paper recommends that in order to contribute to the opening up of cultural heritage resources, Member States should ensure that all qualifying documents that are not currently covered by third party intellectual property rights fall within the scope of the Directive. Member States should also implement the Directive in a way that does not encourage or require institutions to charge for the reuse of works that they make available for reuse. For documents that are still protected by intellectual property rights but where these rights are held by the cultural heritage institutions that have these works in their collections, Member States should encourage the use of Open Definition-compliant licenses