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Deutsch: Britisches Berufungsgericht bestätigt Digital Economy Act

The Court of Appeal has recently rejected the claims made by the two UK ISPs, BT and TalkTalk, that the Digital Economy Act (DEA) violates EU laws.

DEA requires ISPs to send warning letters to widespread file-sharers advising them that complaints have been made against them, and to provide lists of alleged infringements to music and film companies.

The ISPs brought the issue to the court arguing that DEA breached EU laws on data protection and privacy by restricting the customers' basic rights, was incompatible with provisions set out in the E-Com

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Introduction

Following the initial discussions in the European Parliament and the overwhelmingly negative workshop that was held on 1 March, ACTA is close to dead in Europe. What are the strategies for bringing it back to life and how will this impact on other similar initiatives? How can activists ensure that our great success so far can be maintained?

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Deutsch: Neue Netzsperren in immer mehr EU-Ländern

More and more cases were won in court by rightsholders against file-sharing platforms in the past weeks, but the blocking habits of the ISPs are starting to show their limits.

The UK High Court ruled on 20 February 2012 that the operators of The Pirate Bay (TPB) and its users are both guilty of infringing the copyright of rights holders in a case brought by major recording companies including Sony, EMI and Warner. Mr Justice Arnold said that the operators had the ability to prevent illegal file-sharing but did not do so.

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Deutsch: ACTA & die Entscheidungen zu Netlog und Scarlet/Sabam – was wir ...

There has been a great degree of noise around the recent Netlog/Sabam ruling from the European Court of Justice and what this may prove or disprove about ACTA. This article will seek to separate fact from fiction.

In both cases, Sabam had asked for an injunction requiring suspicionless and open-ended filtering of citizens' use of Internet services (web hosting for Netlog and peer-to-peer networks for Scarlet), paid for by the Internet service provider.

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Deutsch: Häufig gestellte Fragen zur Vorlage des ACTA-Abkommens beim Europäis...

Following the recent decision of the European Commission to refer the draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to the European Court of Justice, Access and EDRi have prepared this short FAQ to explain this process.

SABAM (Société Belge des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs), the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, is in the spotlight again. A few months after the Scarlet/SABAM case, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has released a new decision on the legality of filtering systems on the Internet, this time with regard to filtering of content stored on web services.

Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that a social network “cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work”.

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Deutsch: Two Strikes für Deutschland?

On 3 February 2012, the German Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) published a comparative study on graduated response systems in Europe which have been established to fight against copyright infringements on the Internet.

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Deutsch: Hadopi setzt letzten Schritt zur Sperre von Internetzugängen

French authority Hadopi announced on 13 February 2012 that its Commission for the Protection of Rights had sent the first complaints to court against Internet users for illegal downloading of files as the last stage in its three-strike system.

Since November 2010, more than 800 000 French Internet users have received e-mail alerts that they were suspected of illegal downloading of copyrighted material.