The right of communication to the public is set out in Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29/EC (the Copyright Directive or Infosoc Directive), which requires that EU member states must provide authors with the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit any communication to the public of their works by wire or wireless means, including the making available to the public of their works in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them.
On 6 August 2019 the Ondernemingsrechtbank Antwerpen (the court) submitted a request for a preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on a dispute between Mircom, a company registered under Cypriot law, and Telenet, a Belgian internet service provider whose users presumably shared copyright protected works via Bit-torrent. This case…
On 12 June 2019, the High Court of the Netherlands referred four questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for a preliminary ruling. The questions concern an ongoing battle between Stichting Brein, a Dutch anti-piracy organisation representing movie and music industries, and NSE (News-Service.com), an online platform for Usenet services. Stichting…
The recent decision in Warner Music & another v TuneIn Inc [2019] EWHC 2923 (ch), was the first time the English Courts have forensically assessed the implications of CJEU decisions such as GS Media and Svensson on communication to the public over the internet. Many of us have been left bemused by the concepts the…
A key feature of the Copyright Digital Single Market Directive (DSMD) is the legal regime it provides for Online Content-Sharing Service Providers (OCSSP). These are, essentially, internet platforms storing and giving the public access to a large amount of copyright-protected works or other protected subject matter uploaded by their users, which the platform organises and…
Introduction and background Most internet pages are put together from different elements and can include text, pictures or videos which are originally displayed on websites and stored on servers of third parties. Visitors to the internet page usually cannot distinguish between content that is stored on servers controlled by the webpage owner and that stored…
The court granted a blocking injunction requiring a number of internet service providers to block their customers’ access to streaming servers where copyright infringements were taking place through the unauthorised streaming of live footage of sports events. Case date: 20 September 2018 Case number: [2018] EWHC 2443 (Ch) Court: High Court of Justice of England and…
Introduction Cloud Services are often used for communicating, distributing and reproducing digital content, since IP based devices are nowadays a common means for exploiting such content and the IP connection between client devices and servers is made simpler with the use of virtualized resources in Cloud. We noted in a previous post (see here) that…
1 Introduction The right of communication to the public (Article 3 Information Society Directive) is well-established in the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (“Court”) case-law: it no longer only encompasses more physical matters, such as broadcasting of television in hotels (SGAE, C-306/05), but also digital matters, such as linking to copyright infringing content (GS Media,…
In a decision of 13 November 2018 concerning joined cases T 5909-17 and T 891-18 the Swedish Supreme Court, Högsta domstolen (HD), has decided to ask the CJEU whether the catalogue of acts falling within the concept of communication to the public includes the rental of cars with a standard-fitted radio integrated into the central…
The Court reached the conclusion that since the cumulative criteria that formed the necessary condition for assessing “communication to the public” were not fulfilled, there was no communication of sound recordings to the public when a car rental company rented out rental cars equipped with a built-in radio. Consequently, Nordisk Biluthyrning was not liable to…
