finding a website operator guilty of a criminal copyright infringement; the court found that a website providing links to infringing content hosted in P2P networks engaged in a communication to the public of those contents; the court held that the activity was not sheltered by the linking safe harbor of the Spanish law; the website operator was sentenced to 18 months of prison (which most likely will not be effective, as is usual in sentences below 2 years); the decision also dealt with the civil liability arising from the crime and thus damages were awarded to the right owners who brought the action.
holding Google and its CEO are not liable for the search engine’s links to pieces of news containing false accusations against an individual; defendants are shielded from liability by Art. 17 of the Spanish Information Society Services Act, which sets forth a safe harbor for information location tools; notices sent by the aggrieved person were not enough to trigger actual knowledge because the illegal character of the information was not obvious by itself and thus Google did not need to take the links down to benefit from the linking safe harbor.
holding a company running a digital newspaper liable for defamatory comments posted on its website by its users; the defendant should have taken more precautions and exert more control on the users’ comments; the defendant chose not to receive a notification which was not clearly addressed to site; in doing so it prevented the aggrieved person to inform the site about the defamation; the obvious defamatory nature of the comments is enough to trigger actual knowledge.
holding a blogger not liable for one of his posts and for the comments posted by users; the court found that both the blogger’s post – which linked to allegedly defamatory contents – and the comments posted by users did not amount to a defamation; while they contained harsh criticism against the claimant – the Spanish copyright collecting society, SGAE – they were protected by the right of freedom of expression; thus although the blogger had actual knowledge of the contents and chose not to remove them, no liability attaches because the contents were ultimately licit; the ruling reversed a previous judgment issued by a lower court holding the blogger liable.
See the full abstract and download the article at JIPITEC website. Article examining an important ruling in favour of the Google search engine: the case Sentencia n.172/2012, of 3 April 2012, dealing with the liability of the search engine for copyright infringment.