Fashion retailer, H&M has been unsuccessful in its application to the EU General Court to invalidate YSL’s Community designs for handbags. Community designs protect designs for up to 25 years in every EU Member State. In November 2006, YSL successfully registered two of its designs for handbags. H&M had applied for a declaration of invalidity for these two YSL designs arguing that the designs had no individual character.
On 15 June 2015 the European Council published its final proposed text for the new General Data Protection Regulation. The Regulation is being adopted to provide legal certainty and transparency for businesses and to provide individuals with the same level of rights and obligations in all EU Member States.
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Repeal of Section 52 of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The arco lamp (Castiglioni brothers) and the butterfly chair (Lucian Ercolani, founder of Ercol) are two examples of iconic products, which, until a recently announced change in the law, would not have been able to receive the full duration of copyright protection in the United Kingdom.
In the United Kingdom, as in many other countries, copyright protects an article for the creator’s life plus 70 years. However, there are exceptions, including Section 52 of the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) 1988 which limits protection to 25 years for industrially manufactured copies. Read More
The United States has given us the Scary Movie films, Meet the Spartans and Date Movie. Why has the United Kingdom not produced anything similar? Maybe it is because they were not the greatest of films, but more likely it is because, up until 1 October 2014, the United Kingdom did not have a parody exception to copyright infringement. The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Quotation and Parody) Regulations 2014 have come into force and state that “Fair dealing with a work for the purposes of caricature, parody or pastiche does not infringe copyright in the work”. Read More
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