Category: Linklog

In Alfacs Vacances SL v Google Spain SL [2012] (Unreported, Court of First Instance of Amposta, 23 February 2012), a Spanish district court held that Google’s Spanish subsidiary is not a proper defendant (ES) in a claim for an injunction to remove non-tortious but unwanted search results.  From reading this summary of the decision, it appears that the Court… Read more →

Daily irony: abuse of copyright takedown procedure leads to deindexing of article critical of abusive copyright procedures Read more →

Smartphone design before and after Apple’s iPhone.  Image credit to @digerati. Read more →

The trouble with Wikipedia: Scholarly expert on the Haymarket riots tries to edit the (top-ranked) Wikipedia entry for the same, is violently rebuffed by community editors.  In short, anyone can edit, but you must play by the rules: So I waited two years, until my book on the trial was published. “Now, at last, I have… Read more →

High Court concludes The Pirate Bay infringes UK copyrights: In unsurprising news, Dramatico Entertainment Ltd v British Sky Broadcasting Ltd [2012] EWHC 268 establishes that The Pirate Bay infringes the claimants’ UK copyrights by (i) authorising acts of copying and communication by its users; and (ii) engaging in a common design with those users to perform… Read more →

A third high-profile takedown in as many days: this week looks like a losing one for pirates.  Notorious e-book platform Library.nu has been shut down, according to news reports.  The website, in combination with cyber-locker ifile.it, hosted around 400,000 titles — mostly academic textbooks and popular fiction.  Apparently, the operators received around €8m per year from… Read more →

Joining a growing list of takedowns this week, music blog RnBXclusive.com has had its domain name confiscated by the United Kingdom Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). The move is unprecedented because it is the first (publicised) case in which a .com gTLD domain name has been seized by a UK government agency.  It is unclear what… Read more →

In an astonishing display of executive power, popular business form creation tool JotForm has had its domain name suspended by registrar GoDaddy at the ‘request’ of the US secret service.  It is unclear whether a court order was obtained or whether the request came from a state prosecutor.  Either way, this is a terrible denial… Read more →

In Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists v Bell Aliant Regional Communications LP [2012] SCC 4, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a finding that Bell, Rogers and other Canadian ISPs are not “broadcasting undertakings” within the meaning of the Broadcasting Act 1991 (CA), which means they are exempt from the obligation to contribute to local content.  The… Read more →

Eolas, a company which many describe as a “patent troll”, has suffered a serious set-back in litigation against, Google, Amazon and others.  As has been widely reported, a Texas jury found that the patent was invalid for want of novelty.  So, what was the patent?  According to the specification: A system allowing a user of… Read more →