Friday, July 08, 2005

German File-Sharing Round-Up: TV P2P & Advertisement

The news site of the German Institut für Urheber- und Medienrecht provides three decisions on file-sharing. No commentary, just a short round-up:

Apparently a Hamburg Court has prohibited the distribution of the P2P TV software CyberSky TV, again. The software reaches download rates of 400-600 kBit per second so that television broadcasts can be swapped in realtime. Pay channel Premiere feared that its programs would be decoded on a PC and disseminated over the internet using the software and claimed that copyright law doesn't allow the distribution of software that makes the free distribution of its programs over the internet possible. The court followed Premiere's reasoning. Background on the case in this earlier post on the related temporary injunction.
Link [German]

The German music industry was victorious in a lawsuit against the Russian site allofmp3, which offers unlicensed music downloads for 2 eurocents per MByte. A Court in Munich has now prohibited allofmp3 to make copyrighted data publicly available within Germany. In the same press release that brought this news, the music industry also stated that it is going to take action against site that support allofmp3, or similar sites, with advertisement or links (see next point).
Link [German]

On June 14th a Berlin Court confirmed an earlier injunction and decided that internet portals that provide links to pay sites with downloads of illegal MP3 music files, may be subject to cease and desist orders. The court considered that the portal in question could only claim relief under the Telecommunications law for liability from damages, not for the cease and desist order. A Hamburg court decision that excluded liability for external links could also not be a base for the claimed relief. This decision was also restricted to liability flowing from damages.
Link [German]

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