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(English Version) (1) This is a much criticized Supreme Court decision on intermediary liability for defamatory content. There were two contradictory Supreme Court decisions (2001Da36801 and 2002Da72194, see below) prior to this en banc decision on the same issue. (2) The Supreme Court held web portal sites Naver, Daum, SK Communications, and Yahoo Korea liable for the defamation of the plaintiff whom the user postings there accused of deserting a girlfriend upon the second pregnancy after he talked her into aborting the first where the girlfriend then committed a suicide. The court upheld judgments of 10 million won, 7 million won, 8 million won, and 5 million won, respectively, against these services. (3) Specifically, the court held that, barring special circumstances, (a) the intermediary shall be liable for...

(1) This decision applied the rule of 2008Da53812 (see below), the leading case on intermediary liability, on copyright infringement. The defendant was Yahoo Korea and the plaintiff sued Yahoo Korea for copyright infringement. The issue here was whether Yahoo Korea was liable for copyright infringing materials posted by subscribers on its website. (2) The Supreme Court held in favor of the defendant. According to the Supreme Court, OSPs cannot be held liable for merely allowing subscribers to post copyright infringing materials and enabling the materials to be searched on their portals. OSPs are only liable for aiding the infringement for not taking necessary measures under three conditions: (1) illegality of the copyright infringing material is clear; (2) the OSP either received a notice from the right holder or was...

This is a decision on the notice and takedown system under Article 44-2 of ICNA (see above). The Constitutional Court found that the provisions do not infringe upon the freedom of expression under Article 21 of the Constitution because, although the provision, by requiring the service provider to take some actions on all takedown requests, has the danger of abating lawful information, the public interest in taking down unlawful information prevails.

This is a criminal copyright case against the webmasters of a well-known Spanish website called SeriesYonkis, which, until 2014, used to provide links to unauthorized copies of TV series and movies hosted elsewhere (mainly in Megavideo and Megaupload). The links were supposedly uploaded to seriesyonkis by its users. Surprising as it may be in 2019 (particularly after GS Media and Ziggo), the discussion was about whether the activity constituted an act of communication to the public, as required by the language of the Criminal Code. At the time of the activities, the majority of the Spanish rulings in similar cases had found that this kind of acts did not amount to a communication to the public – though there had been also some rulings holding the opposite. SeriesYonkis discontinued the provision of links right when the...

The Spanish Data Protection Authority (AEDP) issued a decision ordering Google Inc to delist a search result pointing to negative comments about the professional conduct of a medical doctor; Google Inc appealed the decision to the Audiencia Nacional (AN); the AN found that the public interest should prevail so that potential patients of that doctor may know about the experiences and opinions of former patients; therefore, the AN reversed the AEDP decision]. [See more info, in Spanish, here.

Holding the owner of the website RojaDirecta liable of copyright infringement; the site would offer links to streams of sports events; the court found the site was engaging in an unauthorized communication to the public, taking into account the criteria set by the CJEU in Svensson and GS Media; exemptions from liability did not apply as the site was considered non neutral, and hence a publisher rather than a mere intermediary. More info, in Spanish, can be found here.