Tuesday 17 August 2010

Another ECJ reference on monitoring and SABAM


This blog has already reported here on the ECJ reference in the case of SABAM v Tiscali.
To that case has now been added another reference from the Belgian courts in the case of Netlog v SABAM. At this stage, details in English are hard to come by, but it appears that Netlog, a social networking site, was subject to a similar attack from SABAM as that which Tiscali/Scarlet received. The difference, of course, is that as a social network, Netlog sits in a different point in the value chain than the ISP and therefore at a different point in the intersection between the various applicable legislation (e-commerce directive, data protection legislation, IP enforcement directive).

The Belgian court rejected SABAM's demands for Netlog to implement filtering and sent the case to the ECJ. It has been filed under case number C-360/10 - but at this stage, the author has been unable to track down any further details of the questions. Netlog's lawyers were quoted as saying they had won on all counts (although I guess his clients would have been even happier for the case to have been dismissed, rather than sent to the ECJ for another year or two of litigation).

1 comment:

Jeremy said...

Dutch IT lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet writes:

"As an avid reader of the 1709 blog and furthermore as a Dutch IT lawyer I wanted to give you some pointers on the Netlog/SABAM case you reported about.

It's true that there is very little in English, so let me try to translate what I have found.

Belgian news site Trends.be (economy/finance news) reports that the same questions as in the Sabam/ Scarlet case have been asked, with the qualification ("precisiering") that this time it concerns a social
networking site and not an access provider.

http://trends.rnews.be/nl/economie/nieuws/e-business/netlog-wint-eerste-veldslag-tegen-sabam/article-1194766814773.htm

The lawyer for Netlog is Patrick van Eecke, a high-profile Belgian lawyer.
http://www.dlapiper.com/patrick_van_eecke/
http://www.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=patrick.vaneecke