holding a company running a digital newspaper liable for defamatory comments posted on its website by its users; the defendant should have taken more precautions and exert more control on the users’ comments; the defendant chose not to receive a notification which was not clearly addressed to site; in doing so it prevented the aggrieved person to inform the site about the defamation; the obvious defamatory nature of the comments is enough to trigger actual knowledge.
holding a blogger not liable for one of his posts and for the comments posted by users; the court found that both the blogger’s post – which linked to allegedly defamatory contents – and the comments posted by users did not amount to a defamation; while they contained harsh criticism against the claimant – the Spanish copyright collecting society, SGAE – they were protected by the right of freedom of expression; thus although the blogger had actual knowledge of the contents and chose not to remove them, no liability attaches because the contents were ultimately licit; the ruling reversed a previous judgment issued by a lower court holding the blogger liable.
See the full abstract and download the article at JIPITEC website. Article examining an important ruling in favour of the Google search engine: the case Sentencia n.172/2012, of 3 April 2012, dealing with the liability of the search engine for copyright infringment.
dismissing a copyright infringement claim brought by a website owner against Google; the Court of Appeals held that while Google’s acts of reproducing and making available a cached copy of the website were not covered by the caching or the linking safe harbor, nor by the temporary reproductions exemption, some general limits apply to copyright owners’ claims, such as the doctrines of abuse of right and the ius usus innocui — the right of using someone else’s property in a way that does not harm its owner; the applicability of those limits to copyright can be inferred from art. 40 of the Spanish Copyright Act, which enacts the “three step test”; the Supreme Court affirmed the court of appeals’ ruling, deeming the plaintiff’s claim an abuse of his right.
instituting an administrative body - the Second Section of the Copyright Commission - in charge of issuing orders against information society services hosting copyright infringing materials (Article 43, introducing Article 158. Intellectual Property Commission in the Intellectual Property Law, Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996).
finding that a website offering links to copyright infringing content located somewhere else on the Internet does not satisfy either acts of reproduction or acts of communication to the public element.