The Slovak Court Orders an ISP to Stop Breaching the Net Neutrality

The first instance court – District Court in Bratislava I., last Thursday issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting continuance of net neutrality breach by one of the Internet access providers. The injunction was granted in a ongoing unfair competition law case between two ISPs, Slovak Antik and Dutch UPC. The case already started in March this

New CJEU Case: Are Banks Required to Disclose the Identity of their Customers to Trade Mark Holders?

Some readers might remember my blog post on a Dutch decision BREIN v. ING, which basically asked the question whether banks are required to disclose the identity of their customers to copyright holders. As I indicated already in that blog post, German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) was hearing very similar trade mark case at the

ECHR on Liability of ISPs as a Restriction of Freedom of Speech

European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg handed down its first “ISP liability” case – Delfi AS v. Estonia (App. No. 64569/09). The case concerns a question of liability of an Internet news portal for third party comments made on its website under one of the news items. First some background: 7.  The applicant company

CJEU Receives a New Case on Online Copyright Infringement & Jurisdiction

The UK IPO reports a new interesting preliminary reference on cross border jurisdiction in copyright law before the Court of Justice of the EU – Hejduk C-441/13. As Pinckley C-170/12 case is very likely to be rejected by the CJEU due to speculation of referring French court, it is good to know that similar questions

Domain Names, Metatags & Comparative Advertising

CJEU in summer decided an very interesting technology related case – Belgian Electronic Sorting Technology (BEST) C-657/11. The case might have strong consequences for both the domain name dispute resolution and search engine optimization – SEO (assuming that metatags still matter at least a little bit). The BEST case is an unfair competition case. The

Some Notes on AG’s Opinion in Google Spain Case

Being in almost summer off-mode, I finally found some time to read AG’s Opinion in Google Spain C-131/12. I was personally quite surprised to find there many references to eCommerce Directive safe harbors and secondary liability in the data protection law. Here are my notes with relevant passages. But let me start with super short

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

Liability for Algorithm Design & Big Data (Google Auto-complete)

The sixth senate of the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) in March decided a case against Google (VI ZR 269/12) involving a question of its liability for Autocomplete Tool. The case was widely reported around various websites (IPKat, DW, BBC, etc.) as ‘Germany tells Google to tidy up auto-complete’. Few weeks ago, the decision full-text

Are Banks Required to Disclose the Indentity of their Customers to Copyright Holders?

FutureOfCopyright reports very interesting recent Dutch copyright case – BREIN v. ING (Case No. C/13/539327). Local anti-piracy group BREIN sued well known bank and insurance company, ING, for disclosure of identity and bank transfers of one of it’s customers, who is a domain name holder of a website (largest Usenet community in the Netherlands with

Injunctions Outside of Tort Law?

Thanks to crowd funding call orchestrated by Jeremy and several extraordinary people from around the world (some of them anonymous), to whom I am greatly indebted for their spontaneous support, I will be able to share one of my recent work-in-progress papers with audience at INTA next week in Dallas. The working version of the