Tighter regulation of social media and other online services in now under discussion in several European countries, as well as in the UK where the government has released a white paper outlining its proposed approach to tackling online harm. Here, Professor Natali Helberger, Paddy Leerssen and Max...
Last week, the German Federal Court of Justice referred a case to the CJEU with respect to the scope of the liability of the online platform YouTube for copyright infringement (Federal Court of Justice, decision of February 21st 2019, Ref. Nr. I ZR 153/17). In particular at issue in the referral is...
A recent decision of the Munich Regional Court marks the first-ever blocking order in Germany against a copyright infringing website (judgment of 1 February 2018 – BeckRS 2018, 2857).
Read more at the Kluwer Copyright Blog
Can YouTube be considered primarily responsible (and, therefore, potentially liable) for the making available of user-uploaded content through its platform? In other words: can YouTube be considered as directly making acts of communication to the public?
This is the crucial question Germany’s...
On April 13, 2018, it was reported that the Berlin District Court had issued a preliminary injunction ordering Facebook not to block a user nor to delete a comment that the user made, even though it breached the platform's community standards.
Read more at I&J Retrospect.
On March 8, 2018, it was reported that the new German government was looking to revise NetzDG, the law passed in June 2017 and enforced since October 1, 2017, which requires companies to remove "obviously illegal" hate speech content within 24 hours of posting or face a fine up to 50 million euros.
...In this decision, the Bundesgerichtshof (“BGH”) applies the latest CJEU case law on liability for linking, namely Svensson(C-466/12), GS Media (C-160/15), Filmspeler (C-527/15) and BREIN/Ziggo(C-610/15) to search engines and in particular to Google’s picture search. Read more at Kluwer Copyright...
On February 27, 2018, the German Federal Court of Justice ruled that Google cannot be held liable for listing websites containing defamatory material in search engine results.
Read more at the I&J Retrospect.
On February 12, 2018, the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBZ) announced that the Berlin Regional Court had ruled on January 16 that Facebook's policy to require users to register under their real name was illegal.
Read more at the I&J Retrospect.
A German court ruled that Facebook’s real name policy is illegal and that users must be allowed to sign up for the service under pseudonyms to comply with a decade-old privacy law. The ruling, made last month but only now being announced, comes from the Berlin Regional Court and was detailed today b...