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.
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...
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...