(1) widening the definition of copyright criminal offense so as to include any act of exploitation, and no longer limited to acts of reproduction, plagiarism, distribution and communication to the public; (2) when the conditions are met, the information service providers’ active facilitation to access or locate copyrighted works that are made unlawfully available on the internet will be considered a criminal offense (Article 151-152 modifing Article 270-271 of the Criminal Code).
(1) The Criminal Court of Appeal of Castellón upheld a previous decision charging the webmaster of the website Bajatetodo.com with a eighteen-month prison term under Article 270 of the Spanish Criminal Code. The website used to provide links to a miscellaneous array of infringing materials available online. (2) The Court of Appeal applied the language of the new copyright reform (see above) by stressing that the webmaster went well beyond a mere passive neutral intermediary role by selecting, ordering and indexing the online resources to access the infringing materials. For this reason, the webmaster could not benefit of the linking safe harbour, specifically provided by the Spanish implementation of the eCommerce Directive. (3) Additionally, the Court of Appeal of Castellón made specific reference to the Svensson case...
providing that ISP could be obliged in some situations to reveal the identity of a subscriber who allegedly engages in copyright infringement (art. 256).
(1) implementing the InfoSoc Directive (2001/29) mandatory exception for temporary acts of reproduction which are transient or incidental, have no independent economic significance, and are an integral and essential part of a technological process whose sole purpose is to enable (a) a transmission in a network among third parties by an intermediary, or (b) a lawful use (art. 31.1); (2) providing that copyright owners may ask for injunctions, where appropriate, against an intermediary whose services are resorted to by a third party to infringe copyright, even where the intermediary’s activity is not infringing in itself (arts. 138, 139.1.h, 141.6); (3) creating an administrative body -- the Second Section of the Copyright Commission (CPI) -- which orders injunctions against information society services who infringe on...
holding YouTube not liable for copyright infringement; the plaintiff had not properly identified the allegedly infringing videos; YouTube met the conditions required by the hosting safe harbor and thus was exempted from liability; YouTube cannot be enjoined generally to prevent copyright infringing uploads. see also CIS blog
Holding the owner of a website liable for third party defamatory comments posted to website’s fora; the defendant had some control mechanisms in place what failed to prevent the postings; the appellate court was right in finding that the defendant had actual knowledge of the illegal content, and that it failed to diligently remove the content; hence the defendant cannot rely on the hosting exemption from liability