'Of Interfaces, snippets and sequences. Is the European Court of Justice fragmenting or integrating the notion of copyright works?' - Mireille van Eechoud: CIPIL Seminar

Mireille van Eechoud, Associate Professor, Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, gave an evening seminar entitled "Of Interfaces, snippets and sequences. Is the European Court of Justice fragmenting or integrating the notion of copyright works?" on Thursday 24th November 2011 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law). Many of the EU directives that harmonize copyright law focus on exclusive rights and their limitations and not on what exactly the subject-matter of these rights is. When is something a work? The domestic laws of Member States give different answers. The EU Court of Justice has now stepped in, seemingly developing a pan-European notion of the copyright work in Infopaq (2009), BSA (2011) and most recently in Football Association Premier League (2011). This is not just an acute problem for UK copyright law, but raises more fundamental questions about how we can arrive at a shared European concept of work(s) of authorship. This seminar explores such questions. Mireille van Eechoud is associate professor, and teaches in IViR's Information Law master programme. A substantial part of her research focuses on international and European intellectual property law, especially copyright, related rights and database protection. Her most recent book in this field, co-authored with Hugenholtz et al. is Harmonizing European Copyright Law. The Challenges of Better Law Making (Kluwer Law International 2009). She is a member of the European Max-Planck Group for Conflict of Laws in Intellectual Property (CLIP). This international group of scholars develops principles and aims to provide independent advice to European and national law-makers. Mireille is the project leader of a multidisciplinary research project on creativity and collaborative authorship in copyright law (2010-2012). This is a collaborative research project funded by ESF/HERA, in which IViR partners with Infomedia (University of Bergen, Norway) and CIPIL. For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk