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The Court confirmed that an injunction against a disturber is available when no third party infringement was committed, but is feared. The Court recalled that injunctions should not lead to “any unreasonable duties to review” and should not “challenge the entire business model” of the platform operator. It opined that an implementation of filtering software to flag objectively suspicious offers (e.g. due to low price for a certain keyword), then subsequently reviewed flagged transactions manually by employees, is a reasonable measure to make.

(1) The court acquitted the administrator of a blog aggregator website, after a Greek TV personality sued him for defamation and indecency over comments posted about him on another blog, whose content the defendant’s website aggregated. (2) Based on P.D. 131/2003 and Directive 2000/31/EC, as well as Greek legislation regarding the liability of news vendors, the court decided that the defendant was an intermediary and could not be held liable for the content of blogs aggregated on his website.

Holding online intermediaries of discussion forums as secondary publishers with liabilities imposed from outset, who also have the duties to monitor and take active actions when noticed of defamatory activities on their platform. Defendants were administrators, providers and managers of a website that hosted one of most popular Internet discussion forums in Hong Kong, known as the Golden Forum. Plaintiffs were publishers of the Oriental Press Groups, one of the most popular local newspapers. Three entries were posted in the defendants’ forum accusing plaintiffs dealing with money laundering, drug trafficking and bribery, etc. Defendants removed two entries with due notice but the last one was removed eight months after being informed. Lower court held the forum for not having duly removed this entry without reasonable...

The case refers to the publication of an article in an online media outlet that contains a hyperlink to a YouTube video. The hyperlink was further reproduced on three other websites, operated by other media outlets. The video was not recorded by a third party and includes statements deemed defamatory by national courts. They also considered that that providing a hyperlink to content qualified as dissemination of facts was unlawful even if the disseminator had not identified itself with the content of the third-party’s statement and even if it had wrongly trusted the truthfulness of the statement. The European Court of Human Rights states that hyperlinks, as a technique of reporting, are essentially different from traditional acts of publication in that, as a general rule, they merely direct users to content available...

Note: This case originated in July 2008 and is based on the Intermediary Liability framework prior to the 2008 Amendment to the Information Technology Act, 2000. The 2008 Amendment had granted safe harbour protection to intermediaries under Section 79 of the Act. Thus, the findings of intermediary liability are applicable only to cases where the cause of action arose prior to December 2008. On December 10, 2019, the Supreme Court of India declined to quash defamation proceedings against Google for its failure to expeditiously remove a defamatory article against the defendant from its Google Group service. The case is significant since it holds that in cases that originated prior to December 2008, intermediaries may be liable as ‘publishers’ in defamation proceedings under Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860. The...

On October 23, 2019, the Delhi High Court issued an injunction against Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter (Defendants) and other online intermediaries, directing them to globally take down a list of URLs from their platforms which were allegedly defamatory to the Plaintiffs. The case was brought by yoga guru Swami Ramdev in relation to an alleged defamatory video and related content posted and disseminated on the Defendants’ platforms. The impugned content summarized the contents of a book which had been found to be defamatory by another court. After a detailed analysis of the law on intermediary liability in India under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Information Technology Rules, 2011, the Court held that the intermediaries were obliged to take down and block all such illegal content and videos which...