Librarians and archivists this week asked the World Intellectual Property Organization’s copyright committee to provide them not only with some exceptions to copyright, but also with protection against liability, IP Watch reports.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has determined that hyperlinking to illegally published copyright material constitutes an infringement when done for a profit.

In GS Media v Sanoma Media, the CJEU ruled that hyperlinking to illegally published material is an infringement of copyright (by way of being a communication to the public) when the hyperlinking party knew, or ought to have known, that the material has been published in breach of copyright.

Importantly, the court also ruled that when the hyperlinking is undertaken for profit, a rebuttable presumption is raised that the hyperlinking party knew that the material is protected and has been published in breach of copyright.  Accordingly, unless the for-profit hyperlinking party is able to rebut the presumption, it will be liable for copyright infringement.

A critical corollary of the court’s reasoning is that not-for-profit hyperlinking to illegally published material generally will not constitute copyright infringement. This is because such hyperlinking is only an infringement if the party doing it has knowledge that the material has been published illegally – and the court considered that this would usually not be the case where the hyperlinking was not undertaken for profit.

A “three-strikes” system to combat online copyright piracy in Australia is on hold, due to the inability of IPSs and copyright holders to agree on how to pay for the scheme.

In a joint letter to the Australian Communications and Media Authority, ISPs and rights-holders said it had “not proved possible to reach agreement on how to apportion all of the costs” for the operation of the scheme, according to a CNET report.

Previously, Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton had said that ISPs and copyright holders should shelve the controversial scheme for 12 months while they consider whether piracy is already being solved by streaming services, according to a ZDNet report.

While copyright holders push for services such as Netflix to enforce geographical licensing restrictions, practitioners worldwide say the law is unclear as to whether getting around so-called geoblocks to access restricted content actually constitutes copyright infringement, reports BNA Legal.

Legal experts around the world say the law is unclear as to whether getting around geo-blocks to access restricted content actually constitutes copyright infringement, reports Bloomberg BNA.

An Australian court has been requested to order 50 ISPs to block access to foreign websites providing infringing copies of films.

The action is the first to be brought under the new s115A of the Copyright Act, which provides that a copyright owner may apply to the Federal Court for an injunction requiring ISPs to block access to a foreign online location, the primary purpose of which is to infringe, or facilitate the infringement of, copyright (whether or not in Australia).

The Statement of Claim shows that the action has been brought by eight copyright owners – including Village Roadshow, Disney and Warner – in respect the website solarmovie.ph and three related locations, all of which are based in Canada and Latvia.

According to the Application, the copyright owners seek orders that the ISPs take reasonable steps to disable access to these locations, by means of DNS blocking, IP address blocking, URL blocking or any alternative technical means agreed by the parties.

The Hollywood studio behind the US film Dallas Buyers Club is no longer pursuing its piracy case against Australians accused of illegally downloading the movie, reports BBC News and SMH.

The Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has ruled that Google’s book digitisation project is sufficiently transformative to qualify as a non-infringing fair use of copyright material.

The decision follows a decade of litigation by the Authors’ Guild, acting on behalf of authors as a class.  The Authors Guild claimed that the copying involved in the digitisation project would usurp authors’ rights to license others to provide digital access to their works.

Persuasive to the appeals court was Google’s use of search functionality and the displaying of snippets of the digitised works.  These features were sufficiently transformative to provide a valuable public benefit without substituting for the authors’ works in the marketplace.

Experts agree that the Australian government’s latest attempt to crack down on illegal downloads of movies, music and TV shows has a gaping loophole.

Attempts to block access to infringing websites under the new site-blocking legislation will be easily avoided, using either proxy servers or virtual private networks, The New Daily reports.