(1) UPC Telekabel appealed on a point of law to the Supreme Court a decision form a lower court ordering Telekable to block access to an illegal movie streaming website (see below). (2) In support of its appeal, UPC Telekabel submited inter alia that its services could not be considered to be used to infringe a copyright or related right within the meaning of Article 8(3) of Directive 2001/29 because it did not have any business relationship with the operators of the website at issue and it was not established that its own customers acted unlawfully. In any event, UPC Telekabel claims that the various blocking measures which may be introduced can all be technically circumvented and that some of them are excessively costly. (3) The Court decided to stay the proceedings and to refer questions to the European Court of...
A Belgian solution to the problem of counterfeiting
Thee three main Belgian ISPs Proximus, Telenet and VOO are joining with right holders and are now blocking 33 websites and 450 domains on copyright grounds. People who are now trying to access these sites will see an ‘online fair play’ message from the Belgian Entertainment Association (BEA). After a year-long legal dispute, the film and music industry and the main internet service providers have decided, on the basis of a joint request, to go to the Brussels French Commercial Court. This case was held in March 2018. The European legislator has set up a mechanism that allows the national judge to issue injunctions to order suppliers to block access to the websites. The BEA and Internet service providers have agreed on a list of 33 websites and 450 domain names that they believe are guilty of facilitating illegal...
Reversing the decision of the Anvers Court of First Instance of July, 8 2010 and ordering Belgian ISPs, Telenet and Belgacom, to block DNS extensions for 11 domain names related to ThePirateBay. The Court clarified that ISPs do not themselves infringe copyright and are not liable for the content transmitting though their services. However, the safe harbours included in the e-commerce Directive do not prevent the court to order them to block infringing webistes, if, according to Article 8.2 of the Infosoc Directive "their services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or a related right." These blocking orders, the Court continued, do not impose on the ISPs a general obligation to monitor the information that they transmit because the injunction only concerns a number of exhaustively mentioned domain names...
Upholding the request of issuing a permanent blocking order for the primary domain name “thepiratebay.org” and other domain names redirecting to this primary domain name. This criminal proceeding was initiated by a public prosecutor after additional domain names directing to ThePirateBay website, other than those blocked under the civil ruling of September 26, 2011, were registered and put back online. The Court of Appeal upheld the decision issued by the court of first instance. The district court decision upheld a preliminary injunction ordering that all the Belgian Internet operators and distributors must block access to the content hosted by servers linked to the primary domain name "thepiratebay.org" and their IP address 194.71.107.50 and 194.71.107.15, in particular "by employing all possible technical means at...
(1) SABAM, the largest Belgian collective management organisation (CMO), sought to obtain the payment of a copyright levy from Belgian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for communicating to the public its repertoire. SABAM claimed that ISPs communicate to the public its repertoire without authorisation. SABAM demanded 3.4 percent of the ISPs' annual user subscription fees as a compensation for piracy committed by the ISPs' users. (2) As requested by law, SABAM informed the Economic Federal Public Service (SPF Economie), the administrative authority in charge of overseeing CMOs' activities, about its request to the ISPs. The SPF Economie issued a negative opinion regarding SABAM's proposed levy. After some inconclusive negotiations and an initial action started by SABAM against the ISPs but rejected on procedural...
confirming the March 13, 2015 judgment of the Brussels Court of First Instance (see below) and restating that there is no legal basis for SABAM to seek the collection of royalties from ISPs for alleged (unauthorized) communication to the public of works in SABAM's repertoire.