Explore

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.

The sizeable CDPA 1988 contains quite a few provisions related to intermediary liability. First of all, Sections 16 to 26 set out the definitions of various copyright infringing acts – those which might be of particular interest to online intermediaries are for example section 16(2) (dealing with the concept of authorisation of infringement) or section 20 (covering communication to the public). Secondly, Section 97A provides the basis for injunctions against providers of information society services. Finally, Section 107 covers the types of copyright-infringing conduct leading to criminal liability, quite a few of which could be potentially applied to online intermediaries. See more at Wikipedia

The decision in CBS v Amstrad is a leading authority on joint tort liability and authorisation liability of intermediaries facilitating the copyright-infringing actions of their users. In this case, a manufacturer and seller of hi-fi equipment (which allowed its users to copy music from one tape to another) was found to be not liable for its customers’ infringing use of said equipment. While this case comes from the “analogue era”, it continues to influence the decisions concerning online intermediaries; for example, it was the key authority considered in the first Newzbin case (see below).

This case asks whether in-line linking or framing of an image can violate the public display right under US copyright law. Diverging from long-standing precedent known as the “server test” under Perfect 10 v. Amazon and other cases outside its Circuit, the District Court here held that framing is an actionable public display. The lower court ruling caused considerable consternation among academics and civil society. Assuming the case is appealed, it will presumably draw amicus briefs and more commentary.

This copyright case plays out against a complex factual backdrop addressed at trial and pleadings in the court below. The evidence included internal emails in which employees of Cox, a major ISP, express disrespect for, and arguably skirt compliance with, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA requires that intermediaries implement policies for termination of repeat copyright infringers. In Cox’s implementation, users accused of infringement via DMCA notices were not suspended until after a tenth notice, and could be considered for reinstatement after later notices. The Court held that this policy was insufficient, and rejected an argument that users could be deemed repeat infringers only after judicial adjudication of infringement. By failing in this DMCA requirement, Cox forfeited the defense for its...

This detailed and somewhat confused opinion concerns LiveJournal, a blog hosting site. LiveJournal’s most successful hosted content, by a wide margin, is a celebrity gossip blog called Oh No They Didn’t. The platform stepped beyond its usual role in relation to this blog: it hired and paid a content moderator, who in turn managed teams of volunteer moderators. The teams rejected material on grounds of pornography, harassment, irrelevance (for gossip that is too old), and more - in sum, rejecting some 2/3 of uploads. They also enforced a list of sources that were not to be used on copyright grounds. The Court considers the platform’s defenses to copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and concludes that the common law of agency applies. The Court holds that a jury must decide the...