Australia is not alone in grappling with the legal status of website scraping, as ongoing litigation in the United States involving global classified’s heavyweight Craigslist shows.

The Craigslist case provides useful insight into the types of claims that might be made against alleged scrapers if proceedings were issued in Australia, reports King & Wood Mallesons.

For a summary of the copyright law on Internet streaming of TV broadcasts, in Australia, the UK and the US, read this KWM report.

The UK Supreme Court has ruled that Internet users who merely read or view copyright-protected webpages enjoy a temporary copying exception under European Union and United Kingdom law, and so do not need permission from rights holders.

However, as IP Watch reports, the court decided to ask the CJEU for a preliminary ruling so that “this critical point may be resolved in a manner which will apply uniformly across the European Union”.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a lower court’s finding that the owners of websites providing torrent files are liable for contributory copyright infringement.

The defendants in Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. v. Fung, 447 F.Supp.2d 306 owned the websites isohunt.com, torrentbox.com and podtropolis.com. These sites collected, organised and made searchable torrent files for movies and other copyrighted material.

The court found the defendants were liable for contributory copyright infringement on an inducement theory, because the plaintiffs had established:

1. distribution of a “device or product” – i.e. access to the torrent files provided by the sites
2. acts of infringement – i.e. the uploading and downloading of the protected material by the users of the sites
3. an object of promoting the product’s use to infringe copyright – proved by unrebutted evidence
4. causation – i.e. the defendants’ use of the P2P file sharing protocol known as BitTorrent

The court also found that the defendants were not entitled to protection from liability under any of the safe harbour provisions of the DMCA.

A California federal court has ruled that an IP address alone is not sufficient to establish identification of an alleged copyright infringer.

As reported by IT-LEX, the decision is consistent with an earlier California court holding that IP addresses are not synonymous with identification.

The CJEU has held that TVCatchup’s live streaming of UK free-to-view terrestrial television broadcasts infringes authors’ rights to control communication to the public within the meaning of Article 3(1) Information Society Directive.

This decision confirms the right of originators to control how, where and when their material is transmitted or re-transmitted, even where the recipients are legitimately allowed to receive the original broadcast, reports Herbert Smith Freehills.

The Pirate Bay founders, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde Kolmisopp, have lost their bid to have the rulings of Swedish courts against their operation of the file-sharing service declared a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

According to the Court’s decision, allowing others to share copyright-protected material for profit-making purposes was covered by the right to “receive and impart information” under Article 10 (freedom of expression).

However, the Court considered that the domestic courts had rightly balanced the competing interests at stake – i.e. the right of the applicants to receive and impart information and the necessity to protect copyright – when convicting the applicants and therefore rejected their application as manifestly ill-founded.

The Center for Copyright Information has announced that US copyright owners will begin rolling out the Copyright Alert System (CAS).

Under the CAS, copyright owners send notices of alleged P2P copyright infringement to ISPs, and the ISPs forward those notices to consumers in the form of “Alerts”.

Consumers whose accounts have been used to share copyrighted content over P2P networks illegally (or without authority) will receive Alerts that are meant to educate rather than punish, and direct them to legal alternatives.

For those consumers who believe they received Alerts in error, there is a process will be in place for them to seek independent review of the Alert received.