Danish Supreme Court Upholds Required Blocking Of The Pirate Bay; Says ISPs Liable For Content
from the something-rotten? dept
While courts in nearby Norway rejected attempts to force ISP Telenor to block The Pirate Bay, the story appears to be quite different in Denmark. There, Telenor (which had been Tele2) was ordered to block The Pirate Bay, followed by a higher court upholding the block. Now, the Danish Supreme Court has weighed in and again insists that it's perfectly fine for courts to demand an ISP totally block a website.Apparently the ruling hinged on a questionable bit of Danish copyright law that makes an ISP liable for the content sent by users, because "the ISP makes temporary copies of small fragments of the copyrighted work as IP packets pass their routers." Of course, if you read the law that way, that puts tremendous liability on any ISP. It seems wholly unreasonable to interpret the law that way -- and, in fact, some point out that this appears to go against EU law. The article also notes that the questionable clause in Danish copyright law that puts this burden on ISPs was written by a guy who (you guessed it) now works for the recording industry. Funny how that works.
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Filed Under: copyright, denmark, eu, internet blocks, liability, the pirate bay
Companies: telenor, the pirate
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I'm surprised the court didnt suggest "ban the interwebs"
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Next Up: Building Owners
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Disappointing
But I don't know if I should laugh or cry about that.
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Does passing e-mail infringe?
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Information society directive
and:
It almost seems as if they have misread the "or" that connects (a) and (b) in Article 5 as an "and".
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Re: Information society directive
The highest ranking civil servant with responsibility for copyright law at the time we implemented Infosoc in Denmark was Peter Schønning. Today he is working for IFPI, and he is head of the IFPI team running the legal proceedings against Telenor.
And this error in implementing Infosoc, which Peter Schønning is responsible for, is the central legal argument in the court proceedings against Telenor.
It is a bit scary that Telenor did not even try to argue against IFPI on this point. But of course Telenor is just a random victim here, with no real interest in this. The parties that IFPI is trying to hit with these court proceedings (The Pirate Bay, and the danish internet users) do not even have the right to be heard by the court.
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Re:
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I'd be in serious trouble in Denmark!
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Phoning it in
Do these people realize The Pirate Bay is....a search engine? Really not much different from typing the same name in to google and adding "torrent"
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This was not a real court case
The advantage for IFPI is that with this kind of court proceedings they do not have to show any evidence. If they can convince the court that their claims are "credible", they can get what they want.
This is not the first case of blocking here in Denmark where no evidence has been shown. IFPI has done the same several times before, and there has never been the following court case that our Code of Law suggests should follow a decision like this - the real court case, where IFPI actually has to prove their claims.
In one case (the blocking of allofmp3.com) we know for a fact that IFPI paid the ISP a significant amount of money to avoid the follow-up court case.
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This is not the first case of blocking here in Denmark where no evidence has been shown. IFPI has done the same several times before, and there has coach outlet online never been the following court case that our Code of Law suggests should follow a decision like this - the real court case, where IFPI actually has to prove their claims.
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