An owner of a website advertising escort services in South Africa found out that the UK copyright-protected pictures from his website were placed on his competitor’s website. The latter party was found to have infringed the copyright in pictures, as it was held that his website was targeted at the UK audience. The factors leading to this finding included the website’s language (English), the traffic data (10% to 25% visitors came from UK) and the website’s structure (composed of national sub-domains, connected to each other). The works were found to be communicated to the UK public.
A case following the initial Cartier decision. It was found that the IP address-based blockade of websites targeted in the initial court order may disable access to other websites using the same IP address. The claimants submitted that this is appropriate for situations where those other websites are also involved in “unlawful activities”, and that it is appropriate to automatically block them together with the initial site; but only if the former are “certified as engaging in unlawful activity”. The ISPs attempted to challenge such an extended blocking order on the grounds that: the court had no jurisdiction, that the term “unlawful activity” was too broad and unclear, that it’s not appropriate for the IP rightsholders to decide on which websites should be seen as sufficiently “unlawful”, and that it is inconsistent...
Another “Newzbin 2” injunction case – an application was granted against 21 torrent websites. It is worth to add that the CJEU case C-466/12 Svensson, and its impact on the notion of communication to the public were distinguished; however, it was stated that the European court’s decision did not change the legal steps required to obtain the “Newzbin 2” injunctions in the UK.
A UK court issued a blocking order in a case involving an attempt to combat trademark infringement rather than copyright infringement. The Court noted that there is no statutory counterpart in the field of trademarks to Sections 97A of the UK Copyright Act. However, the Court granted the injunction construing the Court's general jurisdiction to issue injunctions in the context of Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive. The following criteria were identified for the grant of such an injunction – (1) the ISP receiving the order has to be an intermediary, (2) trademark infringement had to occur on the targeted website (3) the targeted website had to rely on the ISP’s service, (4) the ISP must have had the actual knowledge of the infringements in question. This was the first instance in Europe that a court ordered access...
Self-Regulation/Voluntary Agreement/Code of Conduct
A programme based on the “notice & notice” variant of the graduated response approach. UK ISPs have agreed to send educational notices to P2P filesharers who are found by the copyright holders to share the latters’ content online. See also UK Gov Press Release
These regulations are supplementary to section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 (see below). Among others, they specify the characteristics of a valid notice of infringement, as well as require the website operators wishing to rely on the section 5 defence to respond to such a notice (by eg. removing the content complained of or by contacting its poster) within 48 hours (see Schedule 1 of the Regulations). That said, reg. 5 provides that the courts have the discretion to extend this period.