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‘Cheating’ is not necessarily copyright infringement
Read more: ‘Cheating’ is not necessarily copyright infringementSoftware that facilitates employing unfair practices to secure an illegitimate victory in a video game, once again, made its way to the courts. On 31 July 2025, in a recent judgment (Case no. I ZR 157/21), the German Federal Court of Justice (‘BGH’) had to primarily determine whether cheat software that modifies the original execution of video game software, which is controlled by the underlying computer program, constituted copyright infringement.…
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Institutional liability and fundamental rights in the EU: Case C-679/23 P WS and Others v Frontex
Read more: Institutional liability and fundamental rights in the EU: Case C-679/23 P WS and Others v FrontexThe pending appeal in WS and Others v Frontex presents one of the most significant challenges for the European Union’s external border governance regime in recent years. The case concerns whether the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) can be held liable for its operational role in a 2016 joint return operation conducted with Greek authorities, in which asylum seekers were forcibly returned to Turkey in circumstances allegedly breaching…
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Single Copyright for a Single Market: why has this longstanding vision not been materialised?
Read more: Single Copyright for a Single Market: why has this longstanding vision not been materialised?The current EU copyright landscape consisting of 27 national copyright laws presents fundamental differences. For example, the use of copyrighted works may be permitted in a certain manner in one Member State but not in another due to the divergent copyright exceptions. Consequently, a lack of a single EU copyright law is a critical restraint withholding the EU from achieving a true digital single market. The previous Reprobel blog analysed…
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Herbert Smith Freehills fine and the long shadow of the Common Foreign and Security Policy
Read more: Herbert Smith Freehills fine and the long shadow of the Common Foreign and Security PolicyThis week, one of the UK’s leading law firms – Herbert Smith Freehills – was fined almost half a million pounds for breaching sanctions against Russian banks. The reason for the fine was ‘making funds available for the benefit of a designated person without a licence’ – the designated persons in this case being three banks: Alfa-Bank JSC, PJSC Sovcombank, and PJSC Sberbank. The payments arose as a consequence of…
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Vertical Direct Effect of InfoSoc Directive: the limits of minimum harmonisation in EU copyright law
Read more: Vertical Direct Effect of InfoSoc Directive: the limits of minimum harmonisation in EU copyright lawIntroduction On 14 November 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (‘CJEU’) delivered its judgment in Case C-230/23 Reprobel CV v Copaco Belgium NV (‘Reprobel’) that certain provisions of the Information Society Directive (‘InfoSoc Directive’) could produce a vertical direct effect, entitling domestic courts of EU Member States to disapply erroneous national transpositions of the InfoSoc Directive. Article 5(2)(a) and (b) of the Directive enables Member States to…
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Is Frontex and Dublin III the solution to the Channel migrant crisis?
Read more: Is Frontex and Dublin III the solution to the Channel migrant crisis?Irregular migration – principally the stream of migrants seeking to enter the UK on small boats – looks set to be a key focal point in the forthcoming general election. The Prime Minister has made ‘stopping the boats’ a key pledge for 2023 – and one of the Government’s proposed solutions is the enactment of the Illegal Migration Act 2023. Labour has also pledged to tackle the issue of irregular…
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Spanish Anti-avoidance Tax Law Violates EU Treaties
Read more: Spanish Anti-avoidance Tax Law Violates EU TreatiesDr Stuart MacLennan discusses a recent decision of the Court of Justice of the EU on Spanish rules designed to combat tax avoidance.