(prepared by Swiss Institute of Comparative Law for Council of Europe)
This is one of series of country reports prepared for the Council of Europe in 2015. Other countries' reports, and responses from national governments, are available here. The studies undertake to present the laws and, in so far as information is easily available, the practices concerning the filtering, blocking and takedown of illegal content on the internet.
Section 60a empowers a court to order an intermediary of those users to disclose information of subscribers who make copyrighted content available to the public "to a significant extent". Section 60b governs a suit to forbid continuing the infringement. Section 60c provides a possibility for an "injunction to discontinue" for intermediaries, essentially providing for website blocking or user disconnection orders in case the operator can be identified. In case of a preliminary injunction, the claimant is required to sue the infringer as per Section 60b. Section 60d provides for an interlocutory injunctions in situations like Section 60c. Section 60e provides for blocking injunctions in cases where the operator cannot be identified, for at most one year at at time. Section 60f provides inter alia that in a typical case...
The law combines most telecoms regulations in a consolidated code. It includes previous E-Commerce liability provisions without changes. The data retention legislation was maintained in place with some minor amendments. Intermediaries will need to comply with certain data protection requirements.
The Court held that, in case of infringiment committed through an open WLAN network, it was more likely that the infringment, which was carried out by making works available to the public with DirectConnect, was committed by the the Internet access subscriber, rather than by some unknown user through the open WLAN network.