Topic: Intellectual property

While the UK government stalled in its plans to respond to the rise of AI with legislative change in its March 2026 Report and Impact Assessment on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (the Report), celebrities have turned to trade mark law to combat deepfake imitations of their voices, catchphrases and appearance.

The CJEU’s forthcoming decision on so called “long arm jurisdiction”, under which courts have assumed jurisdiction beyond the limits of strictly national or contractually defined territories could enable far-reaching centralisation of patent litigation in the EU, turning authorised representatives into jurisdictional anchors and significantly increasing procedural and liability risks for global market participants.

The revised Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation and accompanying guidelines will enter into force on 1 May 2026.

Artificial intelligence continues to expand its capabilities and challenge existing legal principles, with copyright law at the forefront.

Courts are beginning to define how companies should consider retaining outputs generated by GenAI tools.

A recent decision by the German Hanseatic Higher Regional Court (OLG Hamburg, 5 U 104/24, 10 December 2025) in the case of Robert Kneschke v. LAION e.V. provides the first appellate-level guidance in Germany on questions surrounding copyright exceptions for text and data mining (TDM) and scientific research in the context of AI training.

The Regional Court of Munich (LG München I) has issued a landmark judgment in GEMA v OpenAI (Case No. 42 O 14139/24), holding that the use of copyrighted song lyrics for training generative AI models without a licence violates German copyright law.

The judgment was passed down on 4 November 2025 in Getty v Stability AI, the UK’s first case on infringement of intellectual property by generative AI.

On 1 May 2025, the first phase of reform of European design law entered into force. Regulation (EU) 2024/2822 and Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/73 together, as phase I, form part of a broader modernisation initiative (the so-called “Designs and Models Package”) being implemented in two phases.

On 31 July 2025, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) issued its decision (decision of 31 July 2025 - I ZR 131/23) in the long-running dispute between Axel Springer and Eyeo (Adblock Plus), referring the case back to the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg for further examination. (Our previous blog, Germany: Copyright and ad blockers, summarises the earlier stages of this litigation.)