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Legal Opinion/Petition

Brussels Court of First Instance, Civil, SABAM v. Scarlet SA/NV (“The Tiscali/Scarlet case”), 04/8975A, June 29, 2007

In its report filed January, 3 2007, the expert witness presented 11 solutions that can be applied to block or filter file sharing, including 7 applicable to Scarlet/Tiscali. On the basis of this report and the submissions of the parties, the Court ruled that technical solutions do exist to stop copyright infringements of music files via P2P file sharing. Accordingly, the Court ordered Scarlet to implement such measures to prevent future damage, within a period of time of six months and under a penalty of a fine of 2,500 euros per day of violation. Scarlet was also ordered to provide SABAM a description of the measures taken.
Administrative Decision

Competition Protection Commission, Net Info and others vs. Google Ireland and Google Inc., No. 395 (May 12, 2015)

(1) The Bulgarian online media companies Net Info and V Box—Bulgaria's largest video sharing portal—filed a complaint with the Competition Protection Commission (CPC) against Google and its video portal YouTube. The plaintiff claimed that Google violated Articles 29 and 36, para.1 of the Law on Protection of Competition. Article 29 states that “Any action or omission when carrying out economic activity, which is contrary to good faith commercial practices and damages or may damage the interests of competitors shall be prohibited.” Article 36 (1) provides that “Carrying out unfair competition, aimed at soliciting clients, as a result of which existing agreements are terminated or breached, or entry into such agreements with competitors is prevented, shall be prohibited.”) (2) The complaint was prompted by the fact that...
Administrative Decision

Deliberation No. 2016-054, CNIL

According to the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL), by the date of this deliberation Google has processed approximately 80,000 requests of French citizens to delist specific results from its search engine (right to be forgotten requests). The decision affirms the company delisted 51,5% of the requests. To address the complaints of French citizens who had their requests refused, CNIL launched an investigation on the company. Following the assessment of the complaints, CNIL requested Google to delist several results. According to the authority, "it was expressly requested that the delisting should be effective on whole search engine, irrespective of the extension used (.fr; .uk; .com ...). As the delistings were carried out in European extensions, and not in extensions such as google.com or other non-European...
Legal Opinion/Petition

Whatsapp's case against Indian Government's new traceability provision

Whatsapp's first case against a Goverment was filed in India, on the 25th of May
In fact, not only was a case filed by them but also by their parent company, Facebook. The two petitions are substantively similar - they challenge the traceability provision of Rule 4(2) under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021Rules. These rules are the latest rules to be issued under the parent legislation of India's Information Technology Act. Under the new Rules, Whatsapp is directly under threat since it comes under the ambit of a signficant social media intermediary. A social media intermediary is defined as one that "primarily or solely enables online interaction between two or more users and allows them to create, upload, share, disseminate, modify or access information using its services." A signficant one being those intermediaries that have more...
Legal Opinion/Petition

In Re: Prajwala

Case pending decision
In 2015, an NGO named Prajwala wrote a letter to the Supreme Court raising concerns about videos depicting sexual violence being distributed on the internet. The letter sought to bring the Court’s attention to the existence of such videos, and their rampant circulation on online platforms. Based on the contents of the letter, a suo moto petition was registered, with Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Yahoo and Microsoft impleaded as parties. The Court directed that a committee be constituted to advise the Court “on the feasibility of ensuring that videos depicting rape, gang rape and child pornography are not available for circulation.” One of the stated objectives of the committee was to examine technological solutions to the problem – for instance, auto-blocking with the use of keywords and hashes. The orders of the Court...
Legal Opinion/Petition

Kamlesh Vaswani vs. Union of India

Case pending decision
In 2013, lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani filed a petition before the Supreme Court of India challenging Sections 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 75, 79, 80 and 85 of the Information Technology Act 2000, and seeking a ban on all online pornography. It was also prayed that the consumption and dissemination of pornography be treated as a non-bailable and cognizable offence. The case presents crucial implications for the intermediary liability regime in India, since the petition seeks to impose an additional obligation on ISPs to proactively identify and block all pornographic content, or risk being held liable. During the course of the proceedings, the petitioners approached the Department of Telecommunications with a list of 800 websites alleged to be hosting pornographic content. The websites were blocked without any verification. The ban...