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Posts relating to copyright: mostly the obligations that may be placed on intermediaries to deal with breaches of it
The latest case brought by rightsholders under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 has found that bittorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay does infringe copyright according to the Act. Following this decision it seems likely that rightsholders will seek injunctions under s97A of the Act requiring ISPs to “block” access to the site, as […]
After ruling last year on the balance between the rights of copyright holders, users and network providers, the European Court of Justice has now ruled on the same question applied to the case of a hosting provider, the social network Netlog. As in the earlier Scarlett case, the copyright collecting society (SABAM) had asked the […]
The European Court of Justice has set some limits for the sorts of measures that ISPs can be compelled to implement to discourage copyright breach by their networks. Back in 2004 the Belgian rightsholder representative SABAM sought a court order requiring an ISP, Scarlet, to install devices on its network that inspected the content of […]
The latest judgment from the BT/Newzbin case sets out what BT will be required to do to prevent its users accessing the Newzbin2 website that an earlier case found to be breaching copyright. From next month, BT will be required to add the Newzbin URLs to the system it already uses to limit access to […]
Last year’s Digital Economy Act 2010 created a power (s.17) for a court to order a service provider to prevent access to a “location on the Internet” if that location was being used, or likely to be used, to infringe copyright. That power has not been brought into force and last January Ofcom were asked […]
Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee is carrying out an enquiry into the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights Online and, in particular, the effectiveness and proportionality of the Digital Economy Act 2010. Since the Act isn’t yet in operation – we are still awaiting the publication of the Implementation Code by Ofcom – it’s […]
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has today announced that Ofcom will be asked to review the practicality of the provisions in section 17 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 that might in future allow courts to order blocking of infringing sites. In our responses to previous consultations on the Act we have expressed […]
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has published the first draft Statutory Instrument (SI) required for the implementation of the Digital Economy Act’s copyright enforcement process. The Online Infringement of Copyright (Initial Obligations)(Sharing of Costs) Order is is the SI that covers sharing of costs betwen rightsholders and ISPs: as suggested in last summer’s […]
For a while there has been one pair of contradictory answers to the question of whether an IP address was personal data. Two different German courts were asked about addresses in the log of a web server: one said that was personal data, the other said it wasn’t. Now we seem to have another pair. […]
I’ve just submitted our JANET response to the latest Ofcom consultation on the draft Code to implement the Digital Economy Act. The Code contains a lot of the detail that was missing from the original Act and has some significantly different proposals in areas that had been previously discussed in Parliament and elsewhere. In particular: […]