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(1) The plaintiff bought gold on eBay from a seller who had the status of a Power Seller. The Power Seller status is awarded by eBay to sellers who achieve a certain sales volume and who have high ratings. The status therefore improves the credibility of the seller. In this case the seller sold gold which he never delivered. He has been convicted of fraud in 113 similar cases. (2) The Court ruled that eBay was obliged to block the seller who has infringed on eBay's own terms of service. Failing to do so resulted in direct liability for the damage which the buyers, who trusted the credibility of a Power Seller, suffered.

(1) Having established that a website was offering, without their agreement, either a download or ‘streaming’ of some of the films which they had produced, Constantin Film and Wega, two film production companies, referred the matter to the court responsible for hearing applications for interim measures to obtain, on the basis of Article 81(1a) of the UrhG, an order enjoining UPC Telekabel, an internet service provider, to block the access of its customers to the website at issue, inasmuch as that site makes available to the public, without their consent, cinematographic works over which they hold a right related to copyright. (2) The Court prohibited UPC Telekabel from providing its customers with access to the website at issue; that prohibition was to be carried out in particular by blocking that site’s domain name...

(1) The Court, as an appeal court, partially reversed the order of the court of first instance (see below) in so far as it had wrongly specified the means that UPC Telekabel had to introduce in order to block the website at issue and thus execute the injunction. (2) In order to reach that conclusion, the Oberlandesgericht Wien first of all held that Article 81(1a) of the UrhG must be interpreted in the light of Article 8(3) of Directive 2001/29. (3) It then held that, by giving its customers access to content illegally placed online, UPC Telekabel had to be regarded as an intermediary whose services were used to infringe a right related to copyright, with the result that Constantin Film and Wega were entitled to request that an injunction be issued against UPC Telekabel. (4) However, as regards the protection of...

(1) The Austrian political party FPÖ operates the website www.fpoe.at. It alleged that the operator of the domain www.fpo.at infringed its name rights because his site contained content similar to the official website of the party and was designed to mislead the visitors of the site into thinking it is the official website of the party. (2) The Court denied the domain name authority’s obligation to monitor all assigned domain names for an infringement. It also ruled that the deletion of a domain name cannot be the subject of temporary injunction.

This is one of series of country reports prepared for the Council of Europe in 2015. Other countries' reports, and responses from national governments, are available here. The studies undertake to present the laws and, in so far as information is easily available, the practices concerning the filtering, blocking and takedown of illegal content on the internet.