A UK court issued a blocking order in a case involving an attempt to combat trademark infringement rather than copyright infringement. The Court noted that there is no statutory counterpart in the field of trademarks to Sections 97A of the UK Copyright Act. However, the Court granted the injunction construing the Court's general jurisdiction to issue injunctions in the context of Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive. The following criteria were identified for the grant of such an injunction – (1) the ISP receiving the order has to be an intermediary, (2) trademark infringement had to occur on the targeted website (3) the targeted website had to rely on the ISP’s service, (4) the ISP must have had the actual knowledge of the infringements in question. This was the first instance in Europe that a court ordered access...
Self-Regulation/Voluntary Agreement/Code of Conduct
A programme based on the “notice & notice” variant of the graduated response approach. UK ISPs have agreed to send educational notices to P2P filesharers who are found by the copyright holders to share the latters’ content online. See also UK Gov Press Release
These regulations are supplementary to section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 (see below). Among others, they specify the characteristics of a valid notice of infringement, as well as require the website operators wishing to rely on the section 5 defence to respond to such a notice (by eg. removing the content complained of or by contacting its poster) within 48 hours (see Schedule 1 of the Regulations). That said, reg. 5 provides that the courts have the discretion to extend this period.
A successful application for a “Newzbin 2” blocking injunction against two streaming websites (SolarMovie and TubePlus), which were found to facilitate copyright-infringing activities.
A successful application for a “Newzbin 2” blocking injunction against a football streaming website known as FirstRow Sports, which was found to facilitate copyright-infringing activities. For details, see the CIS Blog Post.
Section 5 of the Act sets out a new defence from liability in defamation, for the benefit of website operators. By virtue of this provision, such intermediaries are exempt from liability for defamatory statements uploaded onto their websites by the websites’ users. However, this defence can be overcome if the claimant proves: that it was not possible for the claimant to identify the person who posted the statement, that the claimant gave the operator a notice of complaint in relation to the statement, and that the operator failed to respond to the notice of complaint in accordance with any provision contained in regulations which are to be established under section 5(5) of the Act. See more at Wikipedia