Search results : 501

On 26 April 2017, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in Stichting Brein v. Wullems, concerning the sale of multimedia players which enable easy access to illegal audiovisual content on the Internet. The case arose in 2014, when Stichting Brein, the Dutch foundation for copyright holders, brought a court action against Mr. Jack Wullems to prevent him from selling certain media players, including on his own website, www.filmspeler.nl. The media players, when connected to the Internet and a television, are able to stream audiovisual material from the Internet....

On 24 January 2017, Overijssel District Court partially granted an applicant’s request to order Google Inc. to remove four hyperlinks from its search engine results when the applicant’s name was entered in Google Search. The search results concerned the applicant, who was convicted of child abuse and given a prison sentence of 12 months and a probationary period of 6 months. The applicant’s request concerned four hyperlinks which were shown when the applicant’s name was entered in Google Search: one of the hyperlinks led to a Facebook page containing the applicant’s personal information; two other...

On 12 January 2017, The Hague District Court refused an applicant’s request to order Google Inc. to remove ten hyperlinks from its search engine results. The search results concerned the applicant, a real-estate entrepreneur against whom a criminal investigation had been conducted in 2005 for mortgage fraud. Of the ten search results which were allegedly shown when the applicant’s name was entered in Google Search, two had already been removed by Google. A further five search results had not been obtained by entering the applicant’s name; therefore the Court only considered the three remaining...

On 24 February 2017, the Dutch Supreme Court handed down its first application of the EU Court of Justice’s Google Spain judgment (see IRIS 2014-6:1/3). The Supreme Court overturned lower judgments, holding that rights based on Articles 7 (private life) and 8 (personal data) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in principle outweigh not only the economic rights of search engines, but also the “justified interests” of internet users to access search results. The judgment follows earlier proceedings in lower courts (see IRIS 2014-10/25 and IRIS 2015-5/25), and concerns the following...

On 8 February 2016, Advocate General Szpunar delivered his opinion in Stichting Brein v. Ziggo BV (Case C-610/15) concerning the liability of operators of indexing sites of peer-to-peer networks for copyright infringement. The proceedings began in January 2012, when the District Court of The Hague ordered two Dutch internet access providers (Ziggo and XS4ALL) to block access to The Pirate Bay (TPB). Stichting Brein, a foundation protecting the interests of the Dutch copyright industry, had been granted the right to request the order (see IRIS 2012-2/31). In January 2014, the Court of Appeal in...