November 2014

Philippa Warr explores the recent ruling of the European Union’s Court of Justice which states that embedding videos containing copyrighted material does not constitute copyright infringement.

The European Union’s Court of Justice has issued a ruling on 21 October 2014 which states that embedding a video containing copyrighted material does not constitute copyright infringement.

The ruling on the case BestWater International GmbH vs Michael Mebes and Stefan Potsch has yet to be published in English, but it is available in French and in the official language of the ruling (German) on the court’s website. The basic complaint was that BestWater (a producer and distributor of water filters) objected to the two sales representatives (working for competitors) embedding BestWater promotional videos on their own websites from YouTube.

The case involved Article 3, paragraph 1 of Directive 2001/29/EC, which seeks to harmonise aspects of copyright in terms of how it applies to the information society. Specifically, it states that: “Member States shall provide authors with the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit any communication to the public of their works, by wire or wireless means, including the making available to the public of their works in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.”

Mindy Grewar from the University of St Andrews describes “Upping Your Game“, the third in a series of IP workshops with creative industries practitioners organised by ICC and Creative Scotland, with additional financial support from CREATe.

“Make your assets sweaty”. This wasn’t the typical language we’ve been hearing during our researching of strategies for managing and exploiting IP in Scotland’s creative industries. Our work with Creative Scotland has revealed a common set of challenges—such as the need to recognise one’s IP, to know when to share it or to protect it, and how.

But from a recent workshop on IP in the Scottish games industry, the call to sweatiness –to make intellectual properties ooze with revenue potential—has, er, stuck with us.

The phrase belongs to David Wightman, whose experience with guiding Another Visitor and other media companies in the UK, US and Asia enabled him to advise games companies to operate in “stealth mode”, to be ambitious about their goals and aggressive about their management. Sweaty assets fit this strategy efficiently, because they deliver a greater return on one’s developed IP.

“Make one product and get three out of it, with different skins, for different markets”, David counselled, or consider “reverse engineering—how to get more money from your existing products.”

The European Copyright Society (ECS) published today an opinion welcoming the Court of Justice’s departure from a doctrine of strict…