Known as the “Newzbin 1” case. The operators of a Usenet indexing website (which was found to have been used for the illegal exchange of copyrighted movies) were found to be liable for the infringing activities of their users, on the basis of joint tort liability, authorisation liability and communication to the public.
The operator of a website known as TV Links (which facilitated copyright-infringing activities by hosting links to 3rd party streaming websites) was charged with conspiracy to defraud. The judge initially considered TV Links to lie outside of the E-Commerce Regulations’ “mere conduit” safe harbour (see above), since he saw the website’s operators as assisting their users in infringing activities, and recital 44 of the E-Commerce Directive states that “a service provider who deliberately collaborates with one of the recipients of his service in order to undertake illegal acts goes beyond the activities of ‘mere conduit’ or ‘caching’ and as a result cannot benefit from the liability exemptions established for these activities.” However, the defendants were ultimately able to rely on the reg. 17, for the E-Commerce...
On the basis of the infringing activities occurring on his website, the operator of Oink’s Pink Palace (which was a BitTorrent-oriented music sharing website running a torrent tracker) was charged with conspiracy to defraud. The court found that the defendant operator acted dishonestly and refused to apply the E-Commerce Regulations’ “mere conduit” safe harbour (see above), stating that this provision is aimed at principally legitimate operations, and Oink’s Pink Palace doesn’t count as such. However, the defendant was ultimately acquitted by the jury.
This case was triggered by the appearance of defamatory comments on an online bulletin board, provided by the website operated by the first defendant. Apart from bringing the case against the said operator, the claimant also decided to sue the Google search engine (as a secondary defendant), due to the fact that the defamatory material could have appeared among the latter’s search results, in the form of a “snippet.” The claimant sought, among others, to obtain an injunction restraining the secondary defendant from “publishing or causing to be published or authorising to be published the same or similar words defamatory of the claimant within the jurisdiction of the court.” This request ended up being dismissed, since it was dependent on finding Google liable as a publisher, and the judge found that - in the factual...
Operator of an auction website was not found liable in joint tort liability for failing to prevent trademark-infringing actions of its users, who sold counterfeit goods bearing the claimant’s trademark through the defendant’s website. The case was nevertheless stayed, and referred to the CJEU on matters of EU-law based trademark infringement, liability limitation and preventive measures; the latter decision can be found in the EU section of the WILMap. Following the CJEU judgement, the UK case was settled.
This case saw three British ISPs (AOL, Tiscali and BT) being placed at the crosshair of publisher’s liability for defamatory posts shared through the Usenet newsgroups, due to the fact that the said ISPs provided the Internet connection to users who posted the defamatory material in question. The court found that the three ISPs cannot be regarded as publishers of the defamatory statements – instead, they should be seen as passive facilitators, lying outside of the scope of publisher’s liability.