European Union

On November 26, 2014, the European data protection authorities (DPAs) assembled in the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) adopted guidelines on the implementation of the judgment of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the right to be forgotten. These guidelines contain the common interpretation of...

On September 11, 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decided Technische Universität Darmstadt v Eugen Ulmer KG stating that European libraries may digitize books in their collection without permission from the rightholders. The decision confirmed a previous opinion of the ECJ's Advocate...

Recently, an Advocate General with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) handed down an opinion in Technische Universität Darmstadt v Eugen Ulmer KG stating that European libraries may digize individual books in their collection without permission from the rightholders.

In this dispute, the German...

Recently, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decided in Svensson et al v Retriever Sverige that links to authorized works freely available online do not infringe the E.U.-recognized exclusive right of communication to the public. The outcome accords with U.S. law and (so far) allows the Internet to...

An Advocate General with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently issued an opinion that courts may order Internet Service Providers to block access to copyright infringing websites under European law. The non-binding but highly influential opinion says that ISPs can be required to block access...

A recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) may expand considerably web portals’ liability for hosting users’ comments. In Delfi AS v. Estonia, the ECHR has found Delfi, one of the largest news portals on the Internet in Estonia, liable for anonymous defamation.

Delfi published an...

Per today's ruling, injunctions against European ISPs requiring them to apply filtering tools that monitor traffic to prevent copyright infringement officially violate EU law. The Scarlet decision puts a major stick in the wheel of wholesale copyright holders fighting against file sharing activities...

As of yesterday, Google’s new policy concerning registration of trademarks as keywords for triggering contextual advertisement in many European countries went into effect. The new policy, which strongly relies on the recent ECJ decision on Google’s potential liability for TM infringement via its...

The closely watched battle over the use of trademarks as keywords for purpose of triggering advertisements on Google’s search result pages (AdWords) reached high peak today with the release of the European Court of Justice’s ruling on the French cases. In what appears to be a resounding win for...