Digitized images of works in the public domain: what rights vest in them? Analysis of the recent BGH Reiss-Engelhorn judgment - Part 1 - The IPKat
▻http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/02/digitized-images-of-works-in-public.html?m=1
The German Federal Court of Justice recently published the full version of its highly-anticipated decision on the publication of photographs of paintings held by a group of German museums on Wikimedia Commons. The case had raised several unresolved questions of German copyright law with regard to works in the public domain.
The courts of first and second instance had given favourable decisions to the claimant group of museums. The Federal Court’s judgment confirms these decisions and seems to strengthen the legal position of the owners of paintings in the public domain. But as it refuses to address the most controversial aspect of the decision in appeal, the decision seems to leave the door wide open for future reconsideration of the latter.
Digitized images of works in the public domain: what rights vest in them? Analysis of the recent BGH Reiss-Engelhorn judgment - Part 2
▻http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/02/digitized-images-of-works-in-public_19.html
The only positive feature of the judgment is what makes Tobias call this a pyrrhic victory in his above contribution. The judgment does not reinforce tendencies by the Fifth Senate of the Court to develop a kind of depiction right in property (which in German would be called “Recht am Bild der eigenen Sache”). Such an IP position would wreak havoc in today’s visual public sphere. It would, of course, have been better still, had this judgment sided with scholarship and actively countered those tendencies. That, however, would have put the First Senate in open opposition to the Fifth Senate, which would have called for putting the matter before the Court’s Great Senate, being the forum to solve contradictions between Senates. And there, in the Great Senate, the golden rule is: The Senate that puts the matter forward will lose. So, it’s probably for the better that the First Senate didn’t take this road."
#propriété_intellectuelle #Allemagne #droit #domaine_public #Urbildtheorie