Wednesday whimsies

The Del Boy referral: Tommy Hilfiger Licensing

The Czech Supreme Court has referred two questions to the CJEU for preliminary ruling. Both are concerned with the remedies rights holders might have against intermediaries who lease stalls to market traders. The most famous fictional English market trader was of course Del Boy Trotter, whom the IPKat suspects would not have been a reader of this blog, other than to see what loopholes might exist in IP law. Many thanks to Axel Paul Ringelhann for alerting the IPKat to this referral. The UK government has set a deadline for comments of November 9. The two questions are as follows: 

Not all market traders have offices in
New York & Paris
Photo: Karen Roe under CC by 2.0

"Is a person with a lease of premises in a market, who provides stalls and pitches on which stalls may be placed to individual market-traders for their use, an intermediary whose services are used by a third party to infringe an intellectual property right within the meaning of Article 11 of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights?
"Is it possible to impose on a person with a lease of premises in a market, who provides stalls and pitches on which stalls may be placed to individual market traders for their use, measures, as provided for in Article 11 of Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, under the same conditions as those formulated by the Court of Justice in its judgment of 12 July 2011 in Case C-324/09 L’Oréal and Others v eBay and Others with regard to the imposition of measures on the operators of an online marketplace?"

Making Available Right: a paper and an event

Do music right-holders who grant licences to digital platforms actually own the right to make the work available? That rather arresting question is at the heart of a paper written by Fiona McGugan. The paper, which is a study of this often-neglected right, is available for download here.

But wait, there's more. An event entitled "Creators' Rights In The Digital Landscape" has been organised in the University of Westminster by the Musictank group (where Fiona is an LLM student) around this topic. It will be held on November 10 at 6:30 pm, immediately following another event of much interest to music licensing fans (see below). Details and booking (for which IPKat readers can claim a discount by using the code CRITDL1115) can be found here.

Music Licensing Masterclass

The University of Westminster is hosting a (free) Masterclass on Music Publishing Agreements, which is the first in a series of three master classes in entertainment law, given by Robert Allan, Associate Fellow of the Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture. Robert formerly practised as a music talent lawyer and has negotiated contracts on behalf of artists such as Mike Oldfield, Dire Straits and Wham!, so it's safe to say he knows his way around a publishing agreement, and that he can probably teach a trick or two to even the most experienced practitioner. 
(For the record, this Kat would like to clarify that the exclamation mark in "Wham!" is part of the band's name, rather than being an indication that he is overcome with hysteria and excitement on recalling the duo.)

As mentioned in the preceding item, the first class is on November 10, and conveniently is at 5:30, allowing IP enthusiasts to indulge themselves royally by attending Robert's masterclass followed by the Musictank event.

The master class series is free with registration, and full details can be found here.

EU Customs Enforcement: the Annual Report is out

Want to know how many articles were detained by customs authorities at the EU borders in 2014 based on IP rights? Which country, with a measly 131 detention cases (compared to Germany's 20,719 cases) nevertheless detained one in seven of all items detained EU-wide? The answers to these questions (35.5 million items, and Malta), along with dozens of other essential facts, statistics and trends from the world of customs enforcement, can be found in the latest Annual Report (PDF here), released today. 

For readers short on time, the highlights are outlined in the press release here.