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.
dismissing a copyright infringement claim brought by a website owner against Google; the Court of Appeals held that while Google’s acts of reproducing and making available a cached copy of the website were not covered by the caching or the linking safe harbor, nor by the temporary reproductions exemption, some general limits apply to copyright owners’ claims, such as the doctrines of abuse of right and the ius usus innocui — the right of using someone else’s property in a way that does not harm its owner; the applicability of those limits to copyright can be inferred from art. 40 of the Spanish Copyright Act, which enacts the “three step test”; the Supreme Court affirmed the court of appeals’ ruling, deeming the plaintiff’s claim an abuse of his right.
instituting an administrative body - the Second Section of the Copyright Commission - in charge of issuing orders against information society services hosting copyright infringing materials (Article 43, introducing Article 158. Intellectual Property Commission in the Intellectual Property Law, Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996).
finding that a website offering links to copyright infringing content located somewhere else on the Internet does not satisfy either acts of reproduction or acts of communication to the public element.
The Law No. 2/2011 amended the Spanish Copyright Act to create an administrative body – the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission – which orders injunctions against information society services who infringe on copyright. Its functioning was later amended by Law No. 21/2014. The IP Commission targets particularly websites providing links to infringing works in a purposeful and massive way; it may also require payment, advertising, and access service providers to stop providing their services to the infringer (see above Spanish Copyright Act.
Law instituting an administrative body - the Second Section of the Copyright Commission - in charge of issuing orders against information society services hosting copyright infringing materials (Article 43, introducing Article 158. Intellectual Property Commission in the Intellectual Property Law, Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996).