On 13th, March, 2018, the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Ms. Heather Humphreys T.D., and the Minister of State for Training, Skills, Innovation, Research and Development, Mr. John Halligan T.D. welcomed the publication of the Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Law Provisions Bill 2018. The Bill is in response to a Report entitled “Modernising Copyright” published in October 2013, which was compiled by an independent Copyright Review Committee appointed in 2011.
(prepared by Swiss Institute of Comparative Law for Council of Europe)
This is one of series of country reports prepared for the Council of Europe in 2015. Other countries' reports, and responses from national governments, are available here. The studies undertake to present the laws and, in so far as information is easily available, the practices concerning the filtering, blocking and takedown of illegal content on the internet.
(1) Twitter International Company was ordered to disclose data about the source of tweets about a whistleblower. The tweets, which included allegations of insurance fraud, are alleged to be defamatory. The whistleblower has brought a defamation action against the poster of the tweets, and asked the court to require Twitter to turn over information that would allow the whistleblower to identify the poster. (2) The Court order Twitter to turn over the poster’s name. The Court also issued an injunction to prohibit the destruction of any evidence or records related to the tweets.
(1) The plaintiffs, Sony, Universal and Warner Music, sought an injunction to impose upon UPC Communications, the second largest Irish Internet access provider, an obligation to implement a "Graduated Response Strategy" (GRS) against UPC's subscribers allegedly infringing plaintiffs' copyrights online. The injunction sought was pursuant to s.40 (5A) of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (as amended) (see above) requiring that the defendant take reasonable steps to prevent its subscribers from using the defendant’s internet service for the purpose of breaching the plaintiffs’ copyright in the plaintiffs’ sound recordings (2) According to the court, the essential elements of a GRS are that "(i) the owners of the copyright send to the ISP a list of infringements with reference to specific internet protocol...
The High Court ordered that Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) be added as amicus curiae in the proceedings, which will now proceed to the CJEU. DRI had stated that it would not adopt a position of partisanship. Hogan J. distinguished this case from the case of EMI v UPC 2013 IEHC 204, where DRI was not added as amicus curiae. The court also noted DRI’s successful case before the CJEU – Case 293-12, Digital Rights Ireland v Minister for Communications ECLI:EU:C:2014:238. The court did not permit DRI as amicus to alter the nature of the questions which it had already proposed should be transmitted to the CJEU.
(1) The Data Protection Act 1988 as amended prohibits transfers of personal data outside the state unless adequate privacy protections are in place. In 2000, the European Commission had decided that the USA ensured an adequate level of privacy protection for data. A Safe Harbour framework had been put in place between Europe and the USA regarding transfers of personal data. (2) In light of the Snowden revelations, Mr Schrems, an Austrian lawyer who runs the “Europe v Facebook” group, made a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner arguing that the Commissioner should direct that transfers of personal data from Facebook Ireland to Facebook in the USA should cease. Facebook Ireland is responsible for millions of Facebook users outside the USA and Canada. (3) The Commissioner decided that the request was...