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Deutsch: Urheberrecht im digitalen Zeitalter

On 8 June 2010, Green Party Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) hosted the conference Financing Culture in the Digital Era on how to balance easy public access to culture with guaranteed remuneration for content providers.

The purpose of the meeting was to try and find "mutually beneficial solutions" to ensure access to culture while ensuring a decent living to the creators of online content at the same time.

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Rechtsausschuss des EP verabschiedet inkohärenten Urheber...

This week, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament adopted a far-reaching, contradictory and, at times, fundamentalist non-legislative report on enforcement of intellectual property rights.

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Deutsch: Three Strikes in Irland und Großbritannien

Irish Service Provider Eircom announced on 24 May 2010 its decision to introduce a voluntary graduate response procedure that would end up in shutting down broadband Internet connections of its clients who are considered to illegally download music.

The decision comes after the company concluded an out of court settlement with the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) in 2009 by which the ISP agreed to introduce a graduated response scheme for copyright infringers.

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Deutsch: Oberster Dänischer Gerichtshof bestätigt einstweilige Verfügung zur...

The Danish suppreme court took its decision on 27 May 2010 on the recourse to the decision issued by the High Court (In Danish: landsretten) November 2008. The latter was the in fact the appeal to February 2008 Bailiff court (In Danisg: fogedret) ruling, which obliged Tele2 (which was later taken over by Telenor) to block thepiratebay.org.

The supreme court only ruled that it was correct to issue the injunction and that the Tele2/Telenor interpreted the injunction correctly.

Article corrected on 22.05.2010

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Deutsch: Deutscher Bundesgerichtshof: Geldstrafe für Besitzer von ungesicherte...

The Federal Supreme Court in Germany (Bundesgerichtshof (BGH)) has ruled in a case where an illegal download took place via an low-protected wireless Internet Access point, that the owner of the which should have secure it with a stronger password.

In this case, it was an intellectual property related issue with a musician asking for damages because a piece of music was illegally downloaded and later on made available via a file-sharing network.

But the owner of the WiFi network could prove that he was away on holiday and someone else used his

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Deutsch: Google Image Suche verletzt laut BGH keine Urheberrechte

On 29 April 2010, the German Federal Supreme Court ruled that Google's image search did not infringe copyright.

The ruling comes in a case filed by an artist because, at the introduction of her name, Google's search engine was displaying thumbnail images of her pictures taken from her own site.

Google's search engine has a function allowing the searching of images posted by third parties on the Internet. The images found are displayed as scaled down preview pictures (thumbnails) which have a smaller pixel size than the original images.

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Deutsch: Niederländische Urheberrechtsorganisation fordert Sperre von The Pira...

The Dutch copyright enforcement organisation Brein has requested Dutch internet provider Ziggo to block access to The Pirate Bay. The request concerns the blocking of access of Ziggo's subscribers to the website, which is hosted outside of The Netherlands. Ziggo has announced that it will not cooperate with the request, which means that Brein will likely request the court to order this.

If Ziggo were to be ordered to block access to a website, this would be a first in The Netherlands.

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Deutsch: Niederländische ARGE Urheberrecht lässt Deep Packet Inspection falle...

Last year, a Dutch parliamentary working group on copyright published a heavily contested report on the future of copyright. It advised rendering the downloading of copyrighted content without the permission of the copyright holder illegal.