Bibliographie sélective OHADA

Generative AI has heralded a new age of possibilities and significantly altered the landscape of creation. What was once a niche tool has quickly become a de facto tool that everyday users employ to express themselves, particularly due to the rapid integration of such models into popular digital platforms. Accompanying the extensive usage of Generative AI are concerns from rightsholders regarding the tool’s ability to facilitate rapid and extensive copyright infringement. While complete regurgitation has clear copyright infringement concerns, the precise legality remains unclear for AI-generated output that has the potential to benefit from copyright exceptions and limitations. In efforts to reduce its liability, Generative AI models have introduced safety ‘guardrails’ to prevent, restrict, or alter prompts that it deems would generate output that might infringe copyright. While guardrails serve an important purpose in the face of blatant infringement, these also block or revise prompts which may benefit from exceptions and limitations, and therefore do not infringe copyright. Given these developments, the question of whether AI-generated output can benefit from exceptions and limitations to copyright becomes pertinent. Particularly in the realm of parody and pastiche, restrictions on such output pose serious freedom of expression concerns. This paper first explains how the applicability of these exceptions to GenAI output is independent from the questions of legality in the input stage, and ought to be kept that way. Thereafter, it examines the question of whether these exceptions of parody and pastiche under the EU’s copyright regime can apply to AI-generated outputs, and to what extent they apply.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) now attract personal property rights but continue to challenge existing copyright law. NFTs consist of a digital file, which is either linked to or embedded within a CryptoToken. Copyright in a digital file is, as information only, exploited via communication to the public and making available, whereas a protected work incorporated in a tangible object, i.e. a painting, is exploited via distribution. So, where does this leave protected work incorporated within an NFT, and in particular CryptoArt? What is the nature of a CryptoToken and how does this relate to the underlying digital art file? The landmark case Osbourne v Persons Unknown & Ors [2023] EWHC 340 (KB) confirmed that NFTs are personal property, but the nature of such property rights remains unclear. Drawing on empirical evidence, this paper advocates how copyright law should be interpreted so as to treat NFTs as tangible CryptoAssets, with protected work, whether linked or embedded within the NFT, as incorporated within the CryptoToken. This would equate CryptoArt NFTs to paintings, enabling the distribution of copyright and legitimising secondary markets, which are central to the value and purpose of such NFTs. This reflects the position in practice, is technologically neutral and allows for technological development. It would also provide legal clarity, bolster business confidence, and ensure consumer protection in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. This paper also critiques the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, arguing that the creation of a third category of ‘thing’ in terms of property rights adds further complexity and challenge from a copyright perspective.

Scholarship on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright tends to frame its inquiry around Turing's question — 'Can machines think?' — and the normative challenges of the new Spring of AI. This paper asks instead whether the governance challenges of Generative AI (GenAI) are genuinely unprecedented, or a new iteration of the endogenous self-structuration processes that have historically linked technological innovation and intellectual property law. Tracing the evolution of creative guilds — from the Stationers' Company to the decentralised guilds of the digital economy — it shows that clashes between creative industries and emergent technologies have consistently been resolved through lex mercatoria before sovereign regulation crystallised. It then argues that GenAI's architecture introduces a collective-moral dimension to authorship that copyright frameworks built around individual creativity cannot accommodate. The paper advances two contributions: pictographic AI-specific licensing instruments modelled on Creative Commons, and protection of complex prompts as copyrightable expression. GenAI's diffusion, it concludes, calls for adaptive governance rather than systemic disruption.

Cette thèse propose une archéologie juridique de la rencontre entre la mode et la propriété intellectuelle en France. Elle étudie la manière dont la mode, objet à la fois culturel, économique et symbolique, est progressivement devenue un objet légitime de droit. L’enjeu n’est pas de dresser un manuel des protections applicables, mais de comprendre quand, comment, par quels acteurs et à quelles fins le secteur de la mode s’est saisi de la propriété intellectuelle. L’hypothèse centrale est que, dans l’industrie de la mode, la propriété intellectuelle ne se borne pas à protéger une valeur préexistante : elle contribue aussi à la produire, à la consacrer et à la convertir. Le droit apparaît ainsi à la fois comme un instrument de reconnaissance symbolique, un outil de lutte contre la copie et la contrefaçon, mais aussi un support d’exploitation économique, par la licence, l’organisation de la diffusion et la transformation des droits en actifs stratégiques.La première partie, L’étendard, montre comment le droit d’auteur, les dessins et modèles et le droit des marques ont servi à légitimer la mode comme œuvre, création industrielle et signe distinctif. La seconde, Le glaive, analyse la propriété intellectuelle comme instrument d’action dans un marché structuré par la copie, la concurrence et la valorisation des actifs immatériels. La thèse met ainsi en évidence la double portée de la propriété intellectuelle dans la mode : vecteur de reconnaissance, mais aussi levier de valorisation, de circulation maîtrisée et de capitalisation. This dissertation offers a legal archaeology of the encounter between fashion and intellectual property in France. It examines how fashion, as a cultural, economic, and symbolic object, gradually became a legitimate subject of law. Rather than providing a practical guide to the available forms of protection, it seeks to understand when, how, by whom, and for what purposes the fashion sector turned to intellectual property.Its central hypothesis is that, in the fashion industry, intellectual property does not merely protect pre-existing value; it also helps produce, consecrate, and convert it. Law thus appears both as an instrument of symbolic recognition, a tool in the fight against copying and counterfeiting, and a means of economic exploitation through licensing, the organization of circulation, and the transformation of rights into strategic assets.The first part, The Banner, shows how copyright, design law, and trademark law served to legitimize fashion as work, industrial creation, and distinctive sign. The second, The Blade, analyzes intellectual property as an instrument of action in a market structured by copying, competition, and the valorization of intangible assets. The dissertation thus highlights the dual reach of intellectual property in fashion: a vector of recognition, but also a lever for valorization, controlled circulation, and capitalization.

The rapid proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has forced a fundamental re-examination of a question copyright law has never had to answer: can authorship exist without a human author? This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the international copyright frameworks operative in five jurisdictions — the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the People's Republic of China — set against the foundational international instruments of global copyright protection: the Berne Convention, the TRIPS Agreement, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Drawing on landmark judicial decisions including Thaler v. Perlmutter (D.C. Circuit, 2025), Li Yunkai v. Liu Yuanchun (Beijing Internet Court, 2023), and the CJEU's Infopaq line of cases, as well as the U.S. Copyright Office's January 2025 Part 2 Report on Copyrightability, this article demonstrates that the current international legal architecture is anchored to a human-centred conception of authorship that precludes autonomous AI systems from holding copyright. It further identifies significant and growing divergence in how jurisdictions treat the human-AI collaborative spectrum, and argues that this fragmentation creates regulatory arbitrage, impedes cross-border creative industries, and demands multilateral reform. The article concludes with a proposal for a WIPO-led harmonisation instrument built on the concept of qualified human creative control.

Ce mémoire est une analyse argumentative des discours présentés à l’OMC en faveur et en défaveur de la Dérogation proposée le 2 octobre 2020 par l’Inde et l’Afrique du Sud. Cette dernière avait comme objectif de suspendre pour la durée de la pandémie de COVID-19 certaines dispositions de l’Accord sur les ADPIC pour préserver la santé publique et remédier à l’iniquité vaccinale. Elle se base sur l’idée controversée selon laquelle l’Accord interfère avec un accès abordable et équitable aux produits de santé à l’échelle mondiale. Le cadre théorique utilisé servira à conceptualiser une rhétorique des droits humains, un modèle argumentatif reposant sur l’instrumentalisation à des fins de justification de politiques économiques. Ce modèle argumentatif a la particularité d’utiliser l’indétermination du droit, des droits humains et de la technique pour formuler de multiples réponses contradictoires simultanéement valides, ainsi que la prétention à l’objectivité de l’aspect formel du droit, fondamental des droits humains et scientifique de la technique pour aparaître apolitique et non-arbirtaire. En recadrant ces discours dans le modèle proposé, nous verrons que l’instrumentalisation des droits humains contient plusieurs problèmes, notamment la légitimation d’arguments opposés pouvant autant être destinés à la réalisation du droit qu’à la défense d’intérêts entrant en conflit avec son objet. This memoir is an argumentative analysis of the narratives presented at the WTO in favor or against the Derogation submitted by India and South Africa on October 2nd, 2020. The latter aimed to suspend some of the WTO TRIPS Agreement dispositions for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic to preserve public health as well as serving as a remedy to vaccinal inequity. It is based on the controversed idea that the Agreement interferes with an abordable and equitable access to health products at a global scale. The theoretical framework will contribute to conceptualize a human rights rhetoric, an argumentative model based on the instrumentalization of human rights to justify economic policies. This argumentative model uses law, human rights and technical indeterminacy to formulate multiple simultaneously valid contradictory answers, and the claim to objectivity of the formal aspect of the law, the fundamental aspect of human rights and the scientific aspect of expertise to seem non-political and non arbitrary. By reframing these narratives in the proposed model, we’ll see that human righs instrumentalization is problematic at multiple levels, notbly the legitimation of opposed arguments that can destined as much to the law’s realization as to the promotion of interests that are at odds with its object.

La politique chinoise d’injonctions antipoursuites (IAP) dans les litiges liés aux brevets essentiels à une norme (BEN) et aux conditions FRAND viole l’Accord sur les ADPIC. Les arbitres de l’OMC ont établi une doctrine de « non-frustration » en vertu de l’article 1:1, affirmant que les mesures nationales ne peuvent pas nuire aux systèmes de propriété intellectuelle (PI) des autres membres. Les IAP chinoises, assorties de lourdes amendes journalières, restreignent indûment les droits des titulaires de brevets en entravant l’application des droits à l’étranger et en faussant les négociations de licences mondiales. La Chine doit désormais réviser sa politique pour garantir la conformité et une transparence accrue pour les « affaires types ». Cette décision limite les effets extraterritoriaux des mesures judiciaires, favorisant une approche plus équilibrée des litiges transfrontaliers en matière de PI. China's Anti-Suit Injunction (ASI) policy in SEP/FRAND disputes violates the TRIPS Agreement. The WTO arbitrators established a "non-frustration" doctrine under Article 1:1, holding that national measures cannot undermine other Members' IP systems. Chinese ASIs, with high daily fines, unduly restrict patentees' rights (Arts. 2 :1 & 2 :2) by obstructing enforcement abroad and distorting global license negotiations. China must now revise the policy to ensure compliance and greater transparency (Art. 6 :1) for influential "type cases". This decision limits the extraterritorial effects of judicial measures, fostering a more balanced approach to cross-border IP litigation.