For more than a year, those of us interested in intermediary liability have been waiting for an important Belgian case, Saban v Tiscali (now Sabam v Scarlet). This has been a long-running battle between Sabam, the Belgian rights management agency representing authors, composers and editors of musical works, and Tiscali, Read more…
A civil court in Amsterdam has delivered a throwback ruling that reverses a decade of legal practice in intermediary liability. The BREIN Foundation is an anti-piracy group in the Netherlands, and it sued News-Service.com Europe (NSE), one of the largest providers of Usenet services in Europe. BREIN brought the action Read more…
This bit of news was reported by the Creative Commons Blog some weeks ago, but it deserves as much dissemination as possible. The regional court of Berlin (Landgericht Berlin) has effectively enforced a CC Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) Unported licence against a far-right party. This is great news because it is Read more…
It has been a very interesting week for UK copyright, with some landmark decisions in Lucasfilm v Ainsworth and Newspaper Licensing Agency v Meltwater. However, everyone seems to be talking about Newzbin. In the case of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp & Ors v British Telecommunications Plc [2011] EWHC 1981, Read more…
The European Court of Justice has finally ruled on the landmark case of L’Oréal v eBay (C-324/09) . It is true that the term “landmark case” gets used quite a lot in these virtual pages, but in this situation is more than accurate. The case has been a long-running legal Read more…
Google has just lost a patent infringement suit in Texas (where else?) which could have nefarious consequences for open source development in the United States. A Texas jury has awarded Bedrock Computer Technologies $5 million USD when it found that the search engine giant had infringed one of its software Read more…
It has been a bad week for the supporters of three strikes copyright policies in Europe. Although at some point last year the panorama looked good for them with the enactment of the Digital Economy Act, it seems like recent legal developments will make it considerably harder for a comprehensive Read more…
Last year an Australian judge gave an important ruling in the landmark case Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Limited [2010] FCA 24. You can read a full report on the case by yours truly here. iiNet is an Australian internet provider, which was sued by Australian film producer Roadshow Read more…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circle has decided on the interesting and important case of MDY v Blizzard. First some background information. In December 2006, Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, sent a cease-and-desist letter to MDY, the makers of a cheat program called Glider. This Read more…
The High Court of England and Wales has decided on an interesting test copyright case regarding linking and news aggregation by public relations firms. The case is that of Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Meltwater Holding BV [2010] EWHC 3099 (Ch). The claimants in the case are the Newspaper Licensing Read more…