On 27 January 2005 the Norwegian Supreme Court ruled on old case; the existence of the website napster.no, which Norwegian internet users could use in 2001 to find music files (not more than 170 in practice) on the Napster file-sharing system. The owner of the site is found guilty of accessory copyright infringement, for having contributed to make the copyright protected music files available to the public.

The Court states that it is beyond doubt that making a web-address known on a website does not constitute a 'making available to the public', regardless of whether or not the link refers to a web-address containing legally or illegally published material. Whether a web-address is expressed on the Internet or in a newspaper is immaterial.

If linking were to be considered as the 'making available to the public', the Court writes, every link, be it to legally or illegally published copyright protected material would require prior authorisation from the rightholder. This was exactly what the music industry claimed. But the court said this was too complicated a reasoning and therefore decided to only look at accessory liability.

The long running legal fight between the German software company Nutzwerk (Leipzig) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII, best known for its extensive lobby against software patents) has culminated in the takedown of the FFII.org website on 1 August 2005. Technically, the website itself wasn't removed, but in a far more radical move, the German company Teamware removed the DNS-registration of the website, making it invisible to the rest of the world. Nutzwerk justified the takedown claim to Teamware by referring to an intermediate Hamburg court injunction that ordered FFII to remove some specific phrases and an insultory headline about Nutzwerk. The line was: 'Nutzwerk: Zuck und Nepp mit Softwarepatenten' (which roughly translates as 'gamble and fake with software patents').

Alvar Freude, the German internet activist, was acquitted on all accounts in the appeal at the German penal State Court of Stuttgart on 15 June 2006. On his website, Freude documents many developments regarding filtering and blocking in Germany, including hyper-links to websites with radical right-wing content and a distasteful website. 4 of these sites had to be blocked by all ISPs in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen since 2002. Two of the sites have meanwhile been dropped from the blocking order.

The public prosecutor demanded the financial equivalent of 140 days of prison sentence for incitement of the masses, distributing propaganda from anti-constitutional organisations and representation of violence. According to the prosecutor, all hyper-links to radical right-wing websites were forbidden. But according to Freude's lawyer and to the

A Berlin court has ruled on 22 February 2005 that a meta search engine has exactly the same legal responsibilities as a regular search engine to prevent users from accessing illegal content. A meta search engine doesn't have any databases of itself that could contain possibly illegal content, but should be able to filter the results from other search engines anyhow, according to the Berlin ruling.

The case results from a complaint by a female television host, who tried to prevent the search engine from producing links to possible nude pictures of her. In fact, the links refer to erotic sites that falsely use the names of many media-personalities in combination with the word 'naked'. The search engine declined it was possible to prevent these results from appearing.

The ruling didn't enter into effect immediately. The operator of the meta

The Dutch Attorney-General for the Supreme Court, Verkade, has once more righted internetprovider XS4ALL and author Karin Spaink in their decade long defence against legal attacks by Scientology. In his opinion for the Supreme Court Verkade argues "Although copyright resides under Article 1 of the First Protocol of ECHR and can therefore be regarded as a human right, this does not exempt copyright from being balanced against the right to freedom of information." In this specific case, in which Spaink quoted several critical paragraphs from a statement made in court by a former member of the organisation, freedom of speech clearly prevails above the claimed copyrights of Scientology.

The case started in September 1995, when XS4ALL servers were formally seized by a bailiff, assisted by a representative from Scientology,

In an important ruling in the McLibel case, the European Court of Human Rights has defended "the public’s right to criticise massive corporations whose business practices can affect people’s lives, health and the environment."

The McLibel case dates back to 1990 when McDonald's decided to file a libel case against 2 English people that were handing out critical leaflets in front of a branch in London. Helen Steel and Dave Morris didn't write the leaflet themselves but became the centre of a libel case which lasted 313 days - the longest trial of any kind in English legal history. In 1994 they were ordered to pay 60.000 UK pound in damages each, because they were unable to prove every allegation in the leaflet. In appeal, in 1997 the sentence was lowered to 40.000 UK pound each. Despite the fact that many allegations were proven to be true, no sanctions were ordered against McDonald's.

The French digital economy law (Loi pour la confiance dans l'économie numérique or LEN) recently entered into force. The first 2 court cases already demonstrate noxious effects of the law. As feared by French civil rights organisations like EDRI-member IRIS, the Human Rights League and others, the LEN creates judicial insecurity for French website editors and ISPs and legitimises private justice. Before the LEN, only courts could decide on take-down of websites (See EDRI-gram 2.12).

The first decision occurred in a defamation case. The French insurance company Groupama filed a case against an individual who maintained a web page with allegations of swindling by the company. The web page was accessible through equally defamatory URL names. Groupama was also suing the ISP, Free, as alleged defamation co-author, until Free decided to temporarily block access to the content. Free had received a notice by Groupama following the LEN ISP liability provisions (article 6), and made the commitment to definitely remove the site after a court decision. The court recognised the defamation by the web page editor and decided that the content must be removed as well as the URLs. Since the ISP had complied with the LEN provisions it was not found to be liable.

A Brussels court of first instance has ruled on 30 November 2004 that internet provider Tiscali should disconnect customers if they violate copyrights, and block the access for all customers to websites offering file-sharing programs. The case was instituted by the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM) on 24 June 2004 with an appeal to consideration 59 of the European Copyright directive (2001/29/EC).

This consideration states: "In the digital environment, in particular, the services of intermediaries may increasingly be used by third parties for infringing activities. In many cases such intermediaries are best placed to bring such infringing activities to an end. Therefore, without prejudice to any other sanctions and remedies available, right-holders should have the possibility of applying for an injunction against an intermediary who carries a third party's infringement of a protected work or other subject-matter in a network."