CIPIL Seminar: 'Deckmyn, Parody & the Making of EU Copyright Law'

Location: B16, Faculty of Law
Speaker: Jonathan Griffith, Queen Mary – University of London

ABSTRACT: In (C-201/13) Deckmyn v Vandersteen, the Court of Justice established parameters for the interpretation of the exception for “caricature, parody or pastiche” within the European copyright acquis. The judgment is likely to have an important disruptive impact in the member states (including the United Kingdom), which have hitherto adopted disparate approaches to the accommodation of parody in copyright law. In this paper, the impact of the Judgment is explored. It is also suggested that Deckmyn is a significant indicator of the techniques employed by the Court to construct a more fully harmonised copyright law within the Union.

BIO: Jonathan Griffiths is Reader in Intellectual Property Law at Queen Mary University of London. He has degrees in English Literature and History and qualified as a solicitor before taking up positions at Nottingham Law School and Queen Mary. His main research interests are in copyright and in the relationship between intellectual property law and fundamental rights and he has written widely in both of these areas. He is interested in copyright policy and reform and has been consulted on copyright policy by a number of public bodies including the UK IPO, SABIP, the European Commission, the Dutch Ministry of Justice and the Japanese Cabinet Secretariat. Jonathan is a member of the European Copyright Society, a group of scholars founded in 2012, with the aim of creating a platform for critical and independent scholarly thinking on European copyright law. The Society has published several widely-read policy proposals. See, for example, the Opinions on the Deckmyn judgment and on the reference to the CJEU in Svensson.