Court of Justice

New Preliminary Reference on Safe Harbors From Cyprus

EU Law Radar reports new preliminary reference on eCommerce Directive safe harboring system – Papasavvas C-291/13. The questions arose in a case dealing with liability for libel committed online.  The claimant in this case, Mr Papasavvas, sues for damages in a Cypriot court because he fells that an article in the defendant’s printed newspaper, which

Is There Any Union Wide Secondary Liability?

In course of preparing my notes for the lecture on ‘Website blockig’, which I will hold in Brno in two weeks at Cyberspace conference, I bumped to several interesting things, which provoked the question formulated in the headline of the article. ‘Is There Any Union-wide Secondary Liability?’ Firstly, let me explain what I mean when

European Originality Doctrine – Another Step Further?

Story of European originality concept seems to be evolving with every possible court case. For those who don´t know what I am talking about, a brief summary first. CJEU first in Infopaq C-5/08 expanded Union law concept of originality to the other works that photographs, databases and computer programs, which have their own directives. Later

Frisdranken Case: Another Bit on ´Intermediary Non-use´ of the Trade Mark

Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided very interesting trade mark case – Frisdranken Industrie Winters BV C-119/10, which deals with the question of whether intermediary companies, such as a service provider who, under an order from and on the instructions of another person, fills packaging which was supplied to it by

Thanksgiving gift from Luxembourg – Sabam!

Huťko is very happy to inform you that the Court of Justice of the European Union just rendered its superb decision in Sabam C‑70/10. Not only it is favorable to “internet freedoms”, but to Huťko’s great surprise, it is also based on different, but even better reasoning (the court actually discussed the balance between IP-rights

Functionality & Expression-Idea Dichotomy Under New European Doctrine of ´Work´

Some of readers might be aware of a pending copyright case Oracle v. Google in the United States. It looks like Oracle is trying to rely on copyright protection of the following subject matter (quoted from Groklaw): .. its “selection, arrangement and structure” of elements in the APIs described by the 37 API specifications ..

Hidden Gems of L’Oreal v. eBay

Some of you might be wondering why Huťko did not report on two most interesting CJEU cases of this beautiful summer – L´Oréal v. eBay C-324/09 and Interflora C-323/09. The main reason is the complexity of said cases. Summing them up in two separate articles would be just not enough to cover everything. And after

Five Interesting & Quite New CJEU Cases

Some recent and interesting IT&IP cases from Luxemburg. Pierre Fabre Dermo-Cosmétique C‑439/09. This relatively unknown decision is actually one of the most important developments of the competition law when it comes to the internet. With AG prof. Mazák, Third Chamber of the Court of Justice held that Article 101(1) TFEU must be interpreted as meaning that, in

BGH & Two ISP Liability Cases

This week, Bundesgerichtshof decided two very interesting cases that both concern liability of internet service providers. The first, deals with liability of German domain name authority  – DENIC and second with liability of Google for the blog posts published by its users on blogging platform Blogger (the one that Huťko writes his posts on). In