Chile enforces net neutrality for the first time, sort of

(via Jose Otero) In 2010 Chile became one of the first countries in the world to enact a net neutrality legislation. The law 20.453 enacts a three-pronged approach to protect users against abuse, firstly by determining that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may not differentiate content based on the origin; it creates an obligation for [...]

European Court of Justice rules against indiscriminate intermediary filtering

Victory! We have victory!

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, [...]

Dutch ruling sends intermediary liability back to the 90s

Usenet servers and clients

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 [...]

German court enforces Creative Commons licence

Thilo Sarrazin by Nina Gerlach / CC BY-SA

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 [...]

Newzbin: Internet filtering and file-sharing

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, the High Court of [...]

Intermediary liability: because you’re worth it (L’Oreal v eBay)

The European Court of Justice has finally ruled on the landmark case of L’OrĂ©al 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 saga between cosmetic manufacturer [...]

Software patent could threaten open source

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 patents. You might be forgiven [...]

The beginning of the end for three strikes?

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 disconnection programme to take off.

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Australian court denies appeal in landmark ISP liability case

You're right Skippy, maybe the movie industry will finally give up this time.

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 [...]

MDY v Blizzard: Terms of Use and copyright infringement

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 program allows users to [...]