I have spent a wonderful, but rather short celebratory weekend in Amsterdam as me and my fellow colleagues have graduated, partied and had all around good fun reminiscing about our year together at the Oudemanhuispoort (pictured above). Upon returning to Bratislava and settling with a life of legal trainee, I promised myself to use my out of office time (currently represented by a very curved line) to start reading an interesting book on business, investing, corporate law, etc., at least until I figure out where my newly established hobby could lead me.

As I was making my selection, I tried hard to recall at least one of numerous book recommendations suggested by prof. Jaap Winter during our European Company Law classes. During those classes, Prof. Winter insisted that we answer a fairly complicated questions such as what is the role (goal) of corporate law (?) or should corporate law...

The International and European Copyright Law class is coming to an end with one more session remaining on the topic of exceptions and limitations, which is perhaps the most debated one given some of the recent judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU. During the most recent class on economic rights, however, an interesting question has been raised in relation to the adaptation right. More specifically, can the adaptation right be considered to be harmonized (at least implicitly) by the Copyright Directive? In addition, in countries that treat the adaptation right separately from reproduction right, would the Copyright Directive allow the introduction of a new exception with regard to, say, user-generated content?

The cat exception, as prof. Hugenholtz called it in reference to the prevalence of cat videos on YouTube, would only legalize what is effectively happening anyway. Users...

A couple of weeks back, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend an interesting lecture on European telecommunications regulation during my regular classes of competition law at the University of Amsterdam. A substantial part of the lecture was devoted to a discussion about net neutrality, which is to be voted on by the European Parliament during its plenary session on 3rd of April.

For various reasons, net neutrality, as proposed by the Connected Continent legislative package, is currently a very sensitive issue. Briefly – telcos want more leeway in charging content providers such as Google or Netflix extra costs as those are (purportedly) necessary considering the bandwidth requirements of their services, while content providers, unsurprisingly, deem any (of those) charges wholly unreasonable. To complete the triangle, however, there is also a third group of interested ‘lobbyists’...