The Swedish Court Of Appeal has kicked off a web-block party in the country, so put on your best anti-piracy hat, get your injunction pens at the ready, and let’s block the fuck out of the internet.
While it was in Sweden that the founders of The Pirate Bay were successfully convicted for copyright crimes in relation to the rampant infringement their website facilitated, Swedish law hasn’t always been so helpful when the music and movie industries have sought to further target the still active file-sharing hub.
Efforts to seize the Pirate Bay’s .se domain got caught up in legal technicalities, and when the major labels and film studios sought to have the site web-blocked in Sweden, a court ruled that internet service providers there couldn’t be obliged to instigate such a blockade under copyright law.
That ruling in the District Court Of Stockholm in 2015 was in some ways surprising, given that courts in various European jurisdictions have now issued web-block injunctions on copyright grounds, which force ISPs to block their users from accessing piracy sites. While those web-blocks have been enabled in some countries by a change to copyright law, in other places – like the UK – judges simply decided that web-blocks were possible under existing copyright rules.
Net firms often object to web-blocking when it first appears on the agenda in any one country, so it wasn’t surprising that Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget opposed the proposal that it block the Bay. Still, the music and movie industries probably didn’t expect the ISP to prevail in the lower Stockholm court. Either way, they quickly appealed, with the case going before the Patent And Market Court Of Appeal – a new IP-focused entity that sits within the Svea Court Of Appeal – last year.
That court ruled in favour of the music and movie companies yesterday, ordering Bredbandsbolaget to get busy web-blocking both The Pirate Bay and another piracy site called Swefilmer. Interestingly, the judges confirmed that their judgement was in part influenced by the web-block injunctions that have been ordered elsewhere in the European Union.
According to Torrentfreak, judge Christine Lager said in a statement: “In today’s judgment, the Patent And Market Court held that right holders such as film and music companies can obtain a court order in Sweden against an ISP, which forces the ISP to take measures to prevent copyright infringement committed by others on the internet. The decision is based in EU law and Swedish Law should be interpreted in the light of EU law. Similar injunctions have already been announced, such as in Denmark, Finland, France and the UK, but the verdict today is the first of its kind in Sweden”.
The verdict can’t be appealed which means Bredbandsbolaget will now have to block the two piracy sites, and it seems likely Sweden’s music and movie industries will now seek further injunctions to force more ISPs to block a plethora of piracy sites. Of course, anyone with the skills to use Google can usually circumvent the blockades pretty easily, though the entertainment industry reckons that they still serve a useful function in trying to persuade consumers to switch to licensed platforms.
The comments by Lager might encourage rights owners to push for web-block injunctions in other EU jurisdictions where web-blocking is yet to occur. As previously reported, when asked to comment on a web-blocking case in the Netherlands, the EU’s Advocate General Maciej Szpunar recently told the European Courts Of Justice that he reckons web-blocking is fine under European copyright law providing judges spend a little time considering ‘proportionality’, ie just how much infringement a targeted site facilitates or hosts.
[from http://ift.tt/2lvivLP]
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