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The High Court of Australia held that iiNet, Australia’s second largest ISP, was not liable for authorising its customers’ infringement of copyright films downloaded over BitTorrent. The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, now the Australian Screen Association, organised a lawsuit brought by 34 movie and television studios, alleging that iiNet was liable by failing to act upon notices alleging that users were infringing their copyrights. The court found that iiNet’s power to contractually terminate the internet accounts of infringing users was only an indirect power to prevent the primary infringements and insufficient to ground liability. Termination would also expose iiNet to the risk of wrongful termination, and would go further than simply preventing infringement by also denying iiNet customers the non...

(1) The defendant maintains an Internet media website where users can upload content if they have an account and are logged in. The general terms and conditions of the website only allow content which does not infringe upon the rights of its authors. The claimant holds the rights to certain photographs which users uploaded to the defendant's website. The right holder sued the defendant for publishing the photographs without consent. (2) The Court ruled that a hosting provider can be sued for injunctive relief only after the claimant has informed him of the infringement. However, this prerequisite is not of formal, but of material character. Therefore, the claimant can bring action against the hosting provider but he will not succeed. The cease and desist letter has to contain specific information about the infringement...

(1) Having established that a website was offering, without their agreement, either a download or ‘streaming’ of some of the films which they had produced, Constantin Film and Wega, two film production companies, referred the matter to the court responsible for hearing applications for interim measures to obtain, on the basis of Article 81(1a) of the UrhG, an order enjoining UPC Telekabel, an internet service provider, to block the access of its customers to the website at issue, inasmuch as that site makes available to the public, without their consent, cinematographic works over which they hold a right related to copyright. (2) The Court prohibited UPC Telekabel from providing its customers with access to the website at issue; that prohibition was to be carried out in particular by blocking that site’s domain name...

(1) The Court, as an appeal court, partially reversed the order of the court of first instance (see below) in so far as it had wrongly specified the means that UPC Telekabel had to introduce in order to block the website at issue and thus execute the injunction. (2) In order to reach that conclusion, the Oberlandesgericht Wien first of all held that Article 81(1a) of the UrhG must be interpreted in the light of Article 8(3) of Directive 2001/29. (3) It then held that, by giving its customers access to content illegally placed online, UPC Telekabel had to be regarded as an intermediary whose services were used to infringe a right related to copyright, with the result that Constantin Film and Wega were entitled to request that an injunction be issued against UPC Telekabel. (4) However, as regards the protection of...

(1) The Austrian political party FPÖ operates the website www.fpoe.at. It alleged that the operator of the domain www.fpo.at infringed its name rights because his site contained content similar to the official website of the party and was designed to mislead the visitors of the site into thinking it is the official website of the party. (2) The Court denied the domain name authority’s obligation to monitor all assigned domain names for an infringement. It also ruled that the deletion of a domain name cannot be the subject of temporary injunction.