(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.
(1) This recent high-profile case was a joinder of multiple applications for injunctions by Greek collecting societies against Greek ISPs in order to block access to websites containing potentially infringing content and enabling downloading of illegal files via p2p services. (2) The court decided it would not allow the injunctions, determining that the intermediary Greek ISPs could not be ordered to block access to the above-mentioned websites. (3) The court also highlighted the need for safeguarding users’ rights of participating in the information society and confidentiality of communications (as outlined in the Greek Constitution articles 5A, 9A, and 19.) and deeming that such a measure was against the principles of proportionality and net neutrality, as the websites and services in question can also be used for...
(1) The court acquitted the administrator of a blog aggregator website, after a Greek TV personality sued him for defamation and indecency over comments posted about him on another blog, whose content the defendant’s website aggregated. (2) Based on P.D. 131/2003 and Directive 2000/31/EC, as well as Greek legislation regarding the liability of news vendors, the court decided that the defendant was an intermediary and could not be held liable for the content of blogs aggregated on his website.
(1) The court ordered a temporary injunction against Greek ISPs in order to block access to certain websites that were thought to illegally contain or distribute copyrighted content on a large scale. (2) The court took care to mention that forcing the ISPs to filter data in order to prevent copyright infringement, restricting communication technologies such as p2p file exchange methods, and blocking entire websites when only certain web pages contained infringing content was disproportionate and against the Greek Constitution and European law but decided to order the blocking of the websites in question on the more questionable grounds of equating hyper-linking towards copies of copyrighted works with hosting such copies (the blocked websites contained hyper-links towards files of copyrighted works hosted on known...
Articles 11-14 provide that the intermediary will not be held liable for the type of information transmitted through, cached in, or hosted on the intermediary’s services, as long as some prerequisites apply. More specifically, for the intermediary to not be held liable, the intermediary must not be the sender of nor be able to select the recipient of the transmitted information, must be unable to modify said information, must take action to remove or restrict cached or hosted information in a timely fashion, and must not be aware of the infringing nature of the information. The intermediary is not required to actively check the transmitted, cached or hosted information in order to determine potential infringement, but is required to report any infringements located, with respect to provisions regarding personal data...
The articles provide that rightsholders may seek injunctions against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe upon creators’ rights, neighbouring rights, or sui generis database rights.