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…
Last Friday, 13 January 2012, the conference “InfoSoc @ Ten: Ten Years after the EU Directive on Copyright in the Information Society” took place in the European Parliament. The conference, organized jointly by the IViR (University of Amsterdam) and the CRIDS (University of Namur), had an ambitious goal: to evaluate the achievements of the Information…
One may sometimes get the impression that competition law and consumer protection law can shed new light on any other regulation of a legal system, no matter how well established. An interesting example of this trend has been provided by a recent decision of the Polish Court for the Protection of Competition and Consumers in…
Spain’s newly elected Partido Popular has recently implemented the controversial Regulation that develops the Intellectual Property disposition contained in the Law for Economic Sustainability (Ley de Economía Sostenible), informally known as the Sinde law (Ley Sinde), after outgoing Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde. The main aim of the so-called Law is to protect the owners, creators…
The New Year’s festivities are just behind us and with these the celebrations around Public Domain Day 2012 that took place in different cities in and outside Europe (Warsaw, Zurich, Turin, Rome, Haifa etc.). 2012 brings with it the joy of using James Joyce’s masterpieces without asking the estate for prior authorization (which more often…
On May 22 of this year Directive 2001/29/EC was exactly 10 years old – a birthday largely gone unnoticed. The ‘Copyright Directive’ or ‘Information Society Directive’ (for experts: ‘InfoSoc Directive’) marked an important stage in the process of harmonization of copyright and related rights in the European Union. In contrast to earlier directives that dealt…
Data creation, intellectual creation and creativity in the world of databases: The Advocate’s General Opinion in the Football Dataco Ltd v. Yahoo! Uk Limited Case and its potential impact in database copyright. What is a database? Are database copyright protection and database sui generis protection completely independent? What is the creativity level for asserting that…
UK: High Court Chancery Division, 09-11-2011: Forensic Telecommunications Services Ltd v. Chief Constable of West Copyright does not subsist in a list of permanent memory absolute (“PM Abs”) addresses of mobile phones that are used to extract data from mobile phones in forensic investigations. There may have been an expenditure of skill, labour and judgement…
By Mireille van Eechoud, Institute for Information Law (IViR) Of the many questions addressed by the Court in its Painer judgment (Case C-145/10) the most impact will probably be on the construction of an EU wide originality criterion for copyright works. Infopaq, BSA and Murphy went before, seemingly extending the originality standard implicit in the…
