The database directive, initiated by the European Commission in 1992 and due to be finalised in the near future, establishes a two-tiered system of protection, amending copyright with a sui generis rule that grants protection against unfair extraction. The terms of protection are extended if the...

The copyright legislation of common law countries is marked by great length, detail and complexity. The hallmarks of complexity are multiple protected subject matters, in respect of which multiple exclusive rights are granted, and to which multiple exceptions apply. This article continues an...

Copyright protection of the restoration and reconstruction of works, especially of public domain works, is a controversial matter. One of the pillars of copyright protection, the requirement that the work is original, that is, it originates from the author and does not derive entirely from a...

Copyright starts with the written word as its model, then tries to fit everything else into the literary mode. It oscillates between two positions on non-textual creative works such as images - they are either transparent, or they are opaque. When courts treat images as transparent, they deny...

The Hungarian National Report on the Balance of Copyright was prepared for the XVIIIth International Congress of Comparative Law, held in July 2010 in Washington D.C. (USA). The report introduces the features of the Hungarian statute law, case law and copyright theory in respect of the issue of...

Internet file-sharing of copyrighted materials created a struggle between right holders, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and file-sharers. After several different attempts to resolve the struggle, many countries began to debate the possibility of a Three Strikes Policy (3SP), which includes,...

In recent years, there has been much debate about the need for intellectual property protection for fashion designs. Two bills introduced before the 111th Congress purported to provide a solution for this need. The Design Piracy Prohibition Act ("DPPA"), which was introduced in the House April...

One issue that has been frequently discussed in the IRIS plus series is the unauthorized supply of copyright protected works via the Internet. The resulting threat of copyright infringements could, at least partly, be prevented through the use of Internet filters, an option that forms the...

This article examines P2P file sharing and the copyright enforcement problem it has created through the lens of scalability. Writing about the growth and governance of the Internet, David Post observed that "scaling problems - the problems that arise solely as a consequence of increasing size or...

Bioinformatics is the development and use of databases for storing and interpreting genomic information. The information explosion in these databases has raised a plethora of intellectual property issues for the scientists who depend on them. Copyright and Database protection are two notable and...