Both users and operators of The Pirate Bay were found to be engaging in activities infringing the claimants’ copyrights. A preliminary case to the (No. 2) described above.
This case concerned a defamatory blog post which appeared on Blogger.com, a website operated by Google. The claimant sought to make Google liable as a publisher of the defamatory statement. Despite the case having been ultimately dismissed due to there being no “real and substantial tort” (only five people were proven to have accessed the defamatory statement), the court found that - at least following the notification - Google can be liable for the defamatory statements posted on Blogger, as a publisher. It’s also worth to add that the court decided that Google could be protected in this case by the “hosting” safe harbour set out in reg. 19 of the E-Commerce Regulations 2002 (see above).
The “Newzbin 2” case. Shortly after the decision in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp v Newzbin Ltd 2010 (described below), the Usenet indexing service was reactivated as Newzbin2. Upon noticing the reinstatement of the convicted website, Fox and other copyright owners successfully applied for a blocking injunction against Newzbin2, based on section 97A of the CDPA 1988 (see above). The requested injunction was aimed at forcing BT (the largest ISP in UK) to prevent its subscribers from accessing the Newzbin2 website.
The defendant operated a website based on free, unauthorised live streaming of television programmes; including those protected by the claimant’s copyright. It was provisionally decided that the defendant’s service did infringe upon the right of communication to the public and the right to reproduction; however the court decided to refer a series of questions to the CJEU, which were covered in the case C-607/11 ITV Broadcasting Ltd v TV Catchup Ltd. The CJEU is currently considering a further reference made in the same proceedings.
The DEA 2010 introduced two key procedures aimed at reducing online piracy through the “graduated response” approach – procedures labelled as the “initial obligations” and the “obligations to limit Internet access”. While neither of those became operational through the Act, it is still worth to outline them here. (1) The first procedure starts with a copyright owner accessing one of the P2P filesharing networks, and attempting to find and download a file to which he owns the copyright. Once he succeeds, he is supposed to record the IP address of the user who made the copyrighted file available, and send it to this user's ISP in the form of a Copyright Infringement Report (CIR). By virtue of s. 3 of the Act, the ISP is then required to forward this CIR to the allegedly infringing user. Should a user receive more than...
The case revolved around the liability of a blog owner for the defamatory comment posted on his website. It was held that checking the spelling and grammar of such user-generated content triggers the finding of facts and circumstances from which the existence of infringing content should have been inferred; preventing the blog owner from relying on the “hosting” safe harbour of the E-Commerce Regulations 2002 (see above).