As we reported last year, an English court recognised the existence of a tort of privacy (more accurately, the tort of misuse of private information) in the case of Vidal-Hall v Google. The case involved a group of Google users who sued the search engine alleging that it had misused Read more…
The 1990s were a bit weird. France won the World Cup. 90210. “Under Construction” animated gifs. Marky Mark. The Rachel. We survived with our sanity intact. Barely. One thing that was weird as well was the obsession by copyright experts to determine the legality of hyper-linking, caching and framing; believe Read more…
The European Court of Justice has produced a very interesting ruling with regards to injunctions ordering intermediaries to block websites which make available infringing content. This has been a hot legal topic in recent years due to the strategy used by various content owners when attempting to tackle copyright infringement; Read more…
The Court of Justice of the European Union has reached a decision in the latest case dealing with questions about whether linking to content amounts to a communication to the public, and therefore unauthorised linking could be pursued as copyright infringement. The case is Svensson and Others v Retriever Sverige Read more…
For something which has the unequivocal weight of the law behind it, software copyright has had a rather bumpy history in the courts. Once we get past the obvious facts of law, namely that copyright protects source code, the application of such protection has been more difficult. The reason for Read more…
Magistrate Judge Gary Brown has produced an interesting document in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York involving four lawsuits regarding so-called copyright trolls, porn producers who sue lots of users based on IP address evidence. The ruling states: “The complaints assert that the defendants Read more…
The High Court of England and Wales has ruled that UK internet service providers must start taking steps to technically block access from their customers to The Pirate Bay (Virgin Media has already started). Arnold J has delivered a short copyright order in Dramatico Entertainment Ltd & Ors v British Read more…
One of the most frequent questions I receive is with regards to the 2010 ruling by the Costa Rican Constitutional Court (Sala IV) declaring access to the Internet as a fundamental right. The Costa Rican online jurisprudence system is considerably clunky and difficult to navigate, and most of the requests Read more…
In a re-enactment of last November’s Sabam v Scarlet, the ECJ has ruled against indiscriminate filtering by service providers again, but this time in a case regarding social networks. In Sabam v Netlog (C‑360/10), the Belgian collecting society Sabam sued a social network site named Netlog, based in Ghent, attempting Read more…
I’ve just finished reading the fascinating case of AMP v Persons Unknown [2011] EWHC 3454 (TCC) via the IP Osgoode blog. This is a BitTorrent case with a twist, as it is NOT a copyright case. Perhaps we have grown accustomed to BitTorrent technology, it is used to share legal Read more…