Search results : 237

On 19 July 2011 the European Commission sent requests for information in the form of letters of formal notice, the first step in the process of an EU infringement procedure, to 20 EU member states. The member states in question, namely Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain, have not yet notified to the Commission measures to implement the new EU Telecoms Package, formally adopted after two years of heated negotiations at the end of 2009...

According to Art. 1 of the Directive 2006/115/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 December 2006 on rental right and lending right and on certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property, authors have an exclusive right to authorise or prohibit the rental and lending of originals and copies of their copyright-protected works. Article 6(1), however, provides member states with the possibility of introducing a derogation from this principle in the case of public lending, provided that the authors at least obtain remuneration for such lending. The correct...

On 14 April 2011, ECJ Advocate General Cruz Villalón delivered his opinion on case C-70/10, involving a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Cour d’ appel de Bruxelles in Scarlet Extended SA v Société Belge des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs (SABAM). The referred question concerns whether or not EU law permits member states to authorise national courts to issue injunctions against Internet Service Providers (ISPs) obliging them to introduce, for all their customers, in abstracto and as a preventive measure, at the cost of the ISP and for an unlimited period of time, a filtering system...

In a judgment of 29 March 2011 the European Court found a violation of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights in the case Radio-télévision belge de la communauté française (RTBF) v Belgium. The case concerned an interim injunction ordered by an urgent-applications judge against the RTBF, preventing the broadcasting of a programme on medical errors and patients’ rights. The injunction prohibited the broadcasting of the programme until a final court decision in a dispute between a doctor named in the programme and the RTBF. As the injunction constituted...

On 26 January 2011 a bill intended to achieve better protection of cultural creations on the Internet was formally proposed. The proposers (members of the Mouvement Réformateur (MR), a liberal party from French-speaking Belgium), emphasising the fundamental importance of cultural creations for every society and highlighting the danger represented by the activity of illegal downloading, stress the need for an appropriate balance between protection for cultural creations and respect for individual liberties. The system proposed is principally built on five pillars. Firstly, the proposal suggests...