Suchergebnisse

In its 2009 decision in Infopaq (C-5/08), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) achieved a landmark result: the de facto, horizontal harmonization of the originality requirement. After that, nothing could stay the same. After providing an overview of the harmonization process in the copyright field over the past 30 years or so and, with that, the environment in which Infopaq came to be, this chapter considers Infopaq and the expansive effect of subsequent case law on other copyright subsistence requirements. The analysis also notes how the eventual outcome of Cofemel (C-683/17), insofar as works of applied art are concerned, is perfectly in line with such a jurisprudence. The chapter further considers the legal and institutional difficulties that such a string of CJEU decisions has given rise to and is yet to resolve before concluding that further questions are likely to be posed to the CJEU in the not too distant future. In other words: the construction of EU copyright is far from over.

Does the occurrence of flood disaster increase the risk of communal conflict and if so, does trust in state political institutions mitigate the adverse effect? This study addresses these questions by studying the intervening effect of trust in local governmental institutions at a sub-national level. The effect of flood disasters on the risk of communal violence is expected to be contingent on peoples' trust that local political structures are able to address potential disputes between groups. Violent conflicts, in that sense, are neither inevitable nor directly determined by the occurrence of disasters. They largely depend on the context of a given society and political response to these external shocks. To test this expectation, the study uses survey data on trust in local state institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa from the Afrobarometer (2005–2018), combined with geo-referenced communal conflict and flood data. In line with theoretical expectations, results suggest that flood disasters are associated with communal violence only for administrative districts that are governed by distrusted local state institutions. Conversely, flood disasters tend to be negatively associated with the risk of communal clashes in the presence of highly trusted local government councils and (especially) trusted judicial courts. Changing model specifications and estimation techniques produces similar results. An out-of-sample cross-validation also shows that accounting for political variables, in addition to flood disasters, improves the predictive performance of the model.