“No obligation of monitoring subsequent publications is inscribed in the law; however French Courts have a tendency to impose such an obligation on hosting providers shifting from a notice and take down rule to a notice and stay down rule.” On 29 May 2012, the Paris Court of First Instance (Tribunal de Grande Instance) issued…
By Raquel Xalabarder, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya “This ruling is very good news for the recent doctrinal attempts to bring some flexibility in the way copyright laws are being interpreted and applied. It is difficult to predict the impact that this ruling may have in successive case law, but it is certainly an important milestone…
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…
The German Federal Court of Justice rejects liability for image search thumbnails even if they are indexed on websites showing the images without permission as long as other websites did so with the rights holder’s consent. The first landmark case involving thumbnail previews of Google’s image search function in Germany (Vorschaubilder I, 2010) had dealt…
The Dutch Court of Appeal in Leeuwarden has ruled in favor of an online market platform with regard to its liability for intellectual property infringements and the burden of policing for unlawful use of its platform. The case between Stokke, the producer of the Tripp Trapp highchair, and Marktplaats, an eBay subsidiary and the most…
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…
In recent years, Italian courts have struggled to create a new figure, the ‘active hosting provider,’ whereby providers that do not offer any content themselves, can nonetheless be held liable with regard to their (commercial) activities in relation to infringing content that was uploaded by users. On the one hand, it could be argued that…
“The ruling confirms the exclusion of ideas from software copyright protection and enlightens certain grey zones of the Software Directive.” The protection of computer programs is one of the nicest paradoxes of copyright law. Even if the protection of the computer programs as literary works has been established in the European and in the international…
On 5 April 2012, the French Court of Cassation stayed of proceedings in a copyright infringement case opposing a French songwriter to an Austrian CD manufacturer and referred preliminary questions to the CJEU on the interpretation of Article 5 (3) of Regulation 44/2001 (on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and…
“One could say that the CJEU by its decision in the Bonnier-case has “defended” or “safeguarded” the right of civil enforcement by right holders against direct online infringers.” As with enforcement of rights in the analogue environment, enforcement of copyright online presupposes that the infringer is identified or that an intermediary takes action. However, it can…
