Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Categories
Articles

Copyright blocking – recent UK cases

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 […]

Categories
Articles

ECJ on Copyright Injunctions: Hosting Providers

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 […]

Categories
Articles

ECJ on Copyright Injunctions

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 […]

Categories
Articles

Website Blocking: Copyright

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 […]

Categories
Articles

Website Blocking: Alive or Dead?

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 […]

Categories
Closed Consultations

Parliamentary Enquiry into the Protection of Intellectual Property On-line

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 […]

Categories
Articles

OFCOM to Review DEA Blocking Powers

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 […]

Categories
Articles

Digital Economy Act – Signs of Life

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 […]

Categories
Articles

Personal Data – yet another contradictory decision

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. […]

Categories
Closed Consultations

DEA Code Consultation

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: […]