by Linda Scales, solicitor, Dublin. A copyright controversy has been raging in Ireland this week. The SOPA/PIPA debate fuelled fears that an unpublished piece of secondary legislation would provide a regime similar to that proposed in the US. The Irish instrument was labelled “Ireland’s SOPA”, even though no one knew what the document contained. In…
By Axel Arnbak, IViR. Last week, a Dutch district court ruled that two internet access providers, Ziggo & XS4ALL, have to block customers’ access to the IP-addresses and (sub)domains of The Pirate Bay. The providers will appeal the ruling of the District Court of The Hague. Amidst global PR-hurricanes on the legality of website blocking,…
Some legislative proposals raise considerable controversy beyond the national territory in which they are issued. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that is currently pending in the US House of Representatives, is one clear example of such a proposal. Aimed at fighting unauthorized trafficking of copyrighted content in the online environment, the proposed…
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…
In a recently announced Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with music and film industry associations, U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs) have agreed to take voluntary action against online piracy. In essence, the MoU establishes a multi-stage model (“graduated response”) that begins with email alerts, and which may end up with bandwidth reductions or limitations in web…
Finland: Finreactor I, Supreme Court (Korkein oikeus), 30 June 2010. Filesharing: The defendants were administrators of the Finreactor BitTorrent file sharing network. The networks’ users could illegally download copyrighted works. The network was built so that the files were not available on the Finreactor’s site but resided on users’ own computers. Finreactor had a tracker…
A Committe set up by the Danish Government has recently proposed concrete initiatives to strengthen the enforcement of copyright on the Internet. The Committee identified four primary focus areas: enforcement of copyright on the Internet, legal business models, increased consumer awareness and sending information letters. In addition, the Committe rejects so-called compensation models according to…
DENMARK – An end user of the Direct Connect file sharing network was found liable for copyright infringements. However, the Supreme Court did not agree with the right holders (respondents) that the extent of the infringements was sufficiently documented and overturned the evidence (a list of files) provided by right holders. Also, the Supreme Court…
On 3 May 2011, the Paris Court of Appeal dismissed the claims of copyright infringement brought by the Syndicat National de l’Edition Phonographique (SNEP- trade association of the French recording industry) against Google. Since 2008, the search engine is proposing a service, Google Suggest, which guesses and suggests a list of keywords in real time…
Kitchin J granted an order for security for costs under rule 24.6 CPR against the claimant in a copyright infringement case. While remaining sensitive to the right of access to the court of the claimant and acknowledging that security for costs should only rarely be ordered solely where the case appears weak, the judge considered…
