“This finding could have been considered predictable, if it wasn’t for a special provision in the Greek Constitution that safeguards participation in the information society.”
Is obliging ISPs to cut off internet access to specific copyright infringing websites compatible with the Greek Constitution? That is one of the main questions that were answered by the ruling of the District Court of Athens of May 16th, 2012.
Even if it is just a response in a demand for injunctions, this decision is important for two reasons. First, it places Greek jurisdiction among other jurisdictions that decided to impose specific technological measures on a website that hosts or offers copyright infrin [...]
The French Supreme Court (“Cour de Cassation”) has upheld, in a ruling of 25 September 2012, a judgment of the Court of Appeal of Paris condemning Radioblog and its managing directors to the payment of damages amounting to over €1 million, in addition to a suspended prison sentence of nine months and a €10,000 fine.
The case is interesting for two reasons: the gigantic amount of damages and the application, for the first time, of new provisions of the French Intellectual Property Code condemning the provision of software applications intended to be used for infringing copyright.
The facts are the following: the website Radioblog provided a software called ‘RadioBlogClub’ to Internet user [...]
A greatest hits album by Spanish pop star Luz Casal is the subject of the first case to be brought before the Intellectual Property Commission, the body created by the so-called Sinde anti-downloading law, aimed at combating copyright violations on the internet.
AGEDI, the collecting society that represents Spain’s phonographic producers, has filed a complaint against the Swiss owner of the website uploaded.to for offering allegedly unauthorized downloads of Casal’s 15-track collection Un ramo de rosas (A bouquet of roses). The commission has also issued a notification to the administrator of the Spanish website bajui.com, Juan José Coronel, for offering a link to the content.
AGEDI arg [...]
German Court of First instance rules that YouTube is only liable for secondary liability for user’s infringing uploads, but must prevent future infringements of identified works by screening of and implementing a word filter for new uploads.
In this test run case the German composers and lyricists collecting society GEMA claimed that 12 songs of its repertoire were made accessible via YouTube without permission and that YouTube LLC was primarily liable for copyright infringement. YouTube’s reaction to this had been to cancel any further negotiations with GEMA about payments for GEMA repertoire content being uploaded to YouTube. Also, YouTube had pre-emptively blocked numerous videos that pot [...]
On 10 May, the District Court of The Hague extended an earlier ruling with regard to two access providers to block The Pirate Bay to several major Dutch access providers. The providers lament the ruling and consider appealing it, but soon more than 90% of the Dutch market blocks the infamous website. On the same day, the Dutch chapter of The Pirate Party was ordered to cancel its open proxy service to The Pirate Bay and to remove referrals to other proxies from its website. Finally game over for The Pirate Bay?
At first glance, and thus according to all hastily drafted media reports, the 10 May ruling against the major providers(Dutch) follows the reasoning of the 11 January ruling (Dutc [...]
This sentence summarizes quite well the decision of the Antwerp Court of Appeal of 26 September 2011 which it is abstracted from.
The Belgian Anti-piracy Federation filed a cease and desist action against Telenet and Belgacom, two Belgian ISPs, in order to make them block The Pirate Bay’s websites in their respective networks.
In first instance, the President of the Commercial Court of Antwerp rejected the claims as he deemed that the requested measures were disproportionate.
The Court of Appeal overruled the decision and granted an injunction on basis of art. 87, §1, al.2 of the Belgian Copyright Act, which transposes art. 8, §3 of the InfoSoc Directive 2001/29/CE, and which provides th [...]
