The claimants, all members of the Motion Picture Association of America holding copyright in a large number of films and TV programmes, were granted a blocking order preventing the use of Popcorn Time, an open source streaming application which used the BitTorrent protocol to download the claimants’ copyright content. A full summary of this case…
On 1 May 2015 a new, second, ‘anti-piracy’ law [1] will take effect in Russia. This law amends the provisions on preliminary interim blocking injunctions for intermediaries introduced by the first anti-piracy law, which took effect on 1 August 2013. In the opinion of this blogger, the new law, like its predecessor, will barely affect…
On June 24, 2014, the Austrian Supreme Court ruled that the Austrian internet service provider UPC Telekabel Wien GmbH must block access to copyright infringing websites. The Supreme Court noted that, in accordance with the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Case C-314/12, such an injunction leaves its addressee to determine the specific measures to…
The Telecommunications Industry Association (Teleindustrien) in Denmark has recently signed a code of conduct defining the conditions of voluntary website blocking by Danish Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In the event that one ISP is ordered by a court decision or by an order from a regulatory body to block the access to a copyright infringing…
“The underlying key question – can technology solve this problem and, if so, should technology be allowed to determine law? – remains unanswered.” On 2-4 July 2014 Information Influx, the 25th anniversary conference of the Institute for Information Law (IViR) was held in Amsterdam. As part of the conference, on the morning of Thursday, 3…
“A clear intention to solve some of the most disturbing problems in Spanish IP.” On February 14th, the Spanish Government approved a bill to amend the law of intellectual property (TRLPI). The bill is currently in its parliamentary proceedings. It is a “patchwork” reform bill dealing with very different topics, some more necessary than others, and…
“A take-down notice which generically refers to the titles of the infringing videos, without specifically indicating their URLs, is not sufficient to determine the “actual knowledge” of the hosting provider.” On May 5, 2014, the Distric Court of Turin has given a preliminary ruling on the proper content of the take-down notices in copyright infringement…
“This indicates the main danger of the ruling, that of fragmentation. This was foreseen by the Austrian referring court, which suggested that guidelines assessing the proportionality of blocking measures be laid down by the CJEU – that would have been welcome indeed! That absence is certainly the biggest deficiency of the ruling.” Last Thursday, the…
“AG Jääskinen declined to classify Google as a “controller” of the data included on the pages indexed by its search engine within the meaning of article 1(d) of the Data Protection Directive.” The CJEU’s Advocate General Niilo Jääskinen issued an Opinion on 25 June advising the Court to refrain from allowing citizens the right to require Google…
“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…
