copyright

Given the outcome of previous hearings on copyright infringement, the court’s conclusion this week that the UK’s major ISPs should be ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay was no surprise. However the judgment raises an interesting technical issue. In a previous hearing, it had been pointed out that there was a way to get around blocks on individual web pages that would not be possible if the block instead referred to the IP address of the website as a whole.

After ruling last year on the balance between the rights of copyright holders, users and network providers, the European Court of Justice has now ruled on the same question applied to the case of a hosting provider, the social network Netlog.

There seems to be a shift in how Governments and rightsholders are looking to use Internet intermediaries, such as ISPs, to enforce Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on line.

The European Court of Justice has set some limits for the sorts of measures that ISPs can be compelled to implement to discourage copyright breach by their networks. Back in 2004 the Belgian rightsholder representative SABAM sought a court order requiring an ISP, Scarlet, to install devices on its network that inspected the content of peer-to-peer communications and blocked any that appeared to contain copyright music.