Dutch ruling sends intermediary liability back to the 90s

How effective are blocking orders against torrent sites?

The High Court of England and Wales has produced another blocking order for UK Internet service providers (ISPs) against three torrent sites. The action was brought by the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) against the main UK ISPs in order to obtain a blocking order against three torrent indexing sites, namely KAT, H33T, and Fenopy.

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What’s up with software copyright? Contrasting Oracle v Google and SAS v WPL

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 this is simple: while [...]

US judge finds that IP addresses cannot be used to identify infringers

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 – identified only by IP [...]

Chronicle of a Block Foretold: UK ISPs ordered to block Pirate Bay

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 Sky Broadcasting Ltd & [...]

Text of the Costa Rican ruling declaring Internet as a fundamental right

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 for information come from non-Spanish [...]

Can a court order stop a torrent file?

A typical BitTorrent swarm.

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 [...]

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, [...]