The claimant brought a claim against Google under art. 10 of the Data Protection Act 1998 in order to oblige the search engine to disable access to pictures infringing on the former’s privacy. Google sought to strike out the claim, on the basis that the order applied for would be incompatible with arts. 13 and 15 of the E-Commerce Directive. The court, after noting that Google is able to block access to individual child pornography images, allowed the claim to go to trial.
Section 56 of this Act repeals sections 17 and 18 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 (which warranted the introduction of specific website blocking injunctions, see below).
A Scottish case, in which the claiming guest house owners were refused a court order which would oblige TripAdvisor - a US-based company – to disclose the personal data of users who wrote allegedly defamatory reviews about the claimant’s establishment. The base of the refusal was that the Scottish Administration of Justice (Scotland) Act 1972 did not cover the identification requests aimed at entities located outside of the country.
An owner of a website advertising escort services in South Africa found out that the UK copyright-protected pictures from his website were placed on his competitor’s website. The latter party was found to have infringed the copyright in pictures, as it was held that his website was targeted at the UK audience. The factors leading to this finding included the website’s language (English), the traffic data (10% to 25% visitors came from UK) and the website’s structure (composed of national sub-domains, connected to each other). The works were found to be communicated to the UK public.
A case following the initial Cartier decision. It was found that the IP address-based blockade of websites targeted in the initial court order may disable access to other websites using the same IP address. The claimants submitted that this is appropriate for situations where those other websites are also involved in “unlawful activities”, and that it is appropriate to automatically block them together with the initial site; but only if the former are “certified as engaging in unlawful activity”. The ISPs attempted to challenge such an extended blocking order on the grounds that: the court had no jurisdiction, that the term “unlawful activity” was too broad and unclear, that it’s not appropriate for the IP rightsholders to decide on which websites should be seen as sufficiently “unlawful”, and that it is inconsistent...
Another “Newzbin 2” injunction case – an application was granted against 21 torrent websites. It is worth to add that the CJEU case C-466/12 Svensson, and its impact on the notion of communication to the public were distinguished; however, it was stated that the European court’s decision did not change the legal steps required to obtain the “Newzbin 2” injunctions in the UK.