Viacom and Google have jointly announced the resolution of their litigation concerning copyright infringement by YouTube.

The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Reuters reported that a person close to the matter said no money changed hands.

According to the joint announcement, the settlement “reflects the growing collaborative dialogue between our two companies on important opportunities, and we look forward to working more closely together”.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that there is no infringement in providing a link to another’s copyright work, unless it is provides access to an audience that the copyright owner had restricted from accessing the work.

The Paris Civil Court has ordered major French internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to, and French search engines to not return results for, specific websites containing copyright-infringing films.

Nomos reports that the claimants, film producers’ and distributors’ unions, deliberately chose to bring a claim not against the illegal download and streaming sites, but rather against the intermediaries.

The court made use of its power to order summarily that any person contributing to an infringement remedy it by taking appropriate measures to prevent or stop the infringement. Given the innovative nature of the process, the judgment – which couldhave been issued by a single judge – was handed down by a panel comprising three vice presidents of the court, lending it greater weight.

A new paper assessing the ‘graduated response’ programmes enforcing copyrights online through has found there is little to no evidence that that graduated responses are either successful or effective, reports IP Watch.

An order requiring ISPs to block the domains of peer-to-peer websites showing pirated material has been issued against a hugely successful stream aggregator of sports content, Mayer Brown reports.

An Australian parliamentary review has proposed ‘a right of resale’ for digitally distributed content.

The ‘right of resale’ would allow consumers to sell no-longer-wanted music, films, software and books that were purchased in digital format.

The proposal, which is contained in the report on IT pricing released late July, has been slammed by the music recording industry.

The French Government has backtracked on the law which allowed repeat copyright infringers to be disconnected from the Internet.

A review by a nine-member panel on policies for French entertainment industries in the digital age concluded that the three-strikes mechanism had failed to benefit authorized services as promised. It recommended that the ultimate sanction of Internet disconnections for infringers should be abolished.

In response to that recommendation, the Ministry of Culture published an official decree that removed the additional misdemeanor punishable by suspension of access to a communication service. However, fines of up to EUR1,500 remain in place, reports TorrentFreak.

The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has upheld a jury’s $675,000 damages award for illegal downloading of 30 songs.

The case began in 2007, when graduate student Joel Tenenbaum was sued by a number of record labels for downloading and distributing 30 songs using file-sharing services like Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa and LimeWire. The jury found Tenenbaum liable for infringing the copyrights in the 30 songs and awarded statutory damages of $22,500 for each song.

Tenenbaum appealed the award on the ground that it violates due process because it is not tied to the actual injury caused, which he estimates to be no more than $450, or the cost of 30 albums at $15 each.

The appeal court dismissed his argument, saying it disregarded the deterrent effect of statutory damages, the inherent difficulty in proving damages in a copyright suit, and Sony’s evidence of the harm that it suffered from conduct such as his.

The Australian Law Reform Commission has recommended adoption of a broad, flexible exception to copyright infringement for ‘fair use’.

Australia, like the UK, currently has only ‘fair dealing’ exceptions. These exceptions are limited to dealings for specific purposes, such as research, study, criticism, review, and news reporting.

The ALRC’s Discussion Paper recommends that the new fair use exception should contain:

• an express statement that a fair use of copyright material does not infringe copyright;
• a non-exhaustive list of the factors to be considered in determining whether the use is a fair use (‘the fairness factors’); and
• a non-exhaustive list of illustrative uses or purposes that may qualify as fair uses (‘the illustrative purposes’)

Other proposals of the ALRC include:

• making void contractual provisions that seek to limit the operation of copyright exceptions – i.e. banning ‘contracting out’ of exceptions; and
• repealing the statutory licences for use of copyright material by governments, educational institutions, and institutions assisting the blind – which should instead be negotiated voluntarily.