Written by Luke Dixon

The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom rules on protection of Stormtrooper headgear and justiciability of U.S. copyright in English courts

The UK Supreme Court (which has replaced the House of Lords as the highest judicial body) has upheld the lower courts’ decisions in a dispute involving copyright in the helmets of the “Stormtrooper” characters from the Star Wars film series but widened the scope of non-UK copyright infringement actions.

In Lucasfilm Limited and others v Ainsworth and another, the court held that the helmets were not entitled to copyright protection under English law because they were utilitarian and were not sculptures that could qualify for protection as artistic works.
Continue Reading Lucasfilm Wins Right to Sue in UK for Infringement of U.S. Copyright

Written by Simon Harms

On 14 December 2010, the European Commission (the “Commission”) adopted a new suite of rules governing co-operation between actual or potential competitors, consisting of (i) guidelines on the applicability of EU competition law to horizontal co-operation agreements (the “Guidelines”) and (ii) two new block exemption regulations covering: (1) R&D agreements; and (2) specialisation and joint production agreements.

The Guidelines and block exemption regulations replaced existing rules which had been in place for a decade and cover a large variety of different types of horizontal co-operation agreements. In an effort to break down the myriad new rules to manageable proportions and in a user-friendly style, GTM has prepared a series of alerts which, in turn, examine the implications for the  various categories of agreement. This alert focuses on standardisation agreements.1  
Continue Reading EU competition: industry standards and antitrust compliance