Jurisdiction in Cyberspace

24 Mar 14: Italy implements administrative take-down of sites selling fake goods

11 Mar 13: UK court issues simplified foreign pirate website blocking orders - The UK High Court has made a court order requiring UK ISPs to block access to three hugely popular peer-to-peer file-sharing web sites based outside the UK

31 Dec 12: Substituted service of Australian legal documents via Facebook - Over recent years, a trend has emerged where Australian courts are permitting the service of documents to be effected through Facebook and other social networking sites (Colin Biggers & Paisley)

1 Nov 12: Pirate Bay’s move to the cloud is futile, says anti-piracy body - The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) has denounced the Pirate Bay’s move to the cloud as useless, saying measures already exist for governments to access cloud data in cross-border criminal investigations (DMH Stallard)

29 Oct 12: Megaupload’s motion to dismiss federal charges denied by US federal court - The foreign corporation behind the alleged piracy website Megaupload.com has failed in its bid to have criminal copyright charges dismissed on the grounds that it lacked a US mailing address and therefore could not be properly served service of process (Arent Fox)

28 Sep 12: Google’s Brazilian chief arrested over allegedly defamatory YouTube videos - Police arrested Google Brazil head Fabio Jose Silva Coelho on 27 September over his refusal to remove two videos on Google’s YouTube that allegedly slander, insult and defame an election candidate (IP Watch)

2 Aug 12: Megaupload cites lack of jurisdiction in attempt to dismiss US charges – Megaupload have filed a motion to dismiss the US government’s charges of mass copyright infringement, arguing that a foreign corporation that lacks a US office is not subject to jurisdiction within the United States

25 Jun 12: Megaupload challenges U.S. indictment – Megaupload.com is challenging whether the United States had the right to bring the action waged against Megaupload and its executives this past January

15 May 12: Potential liability in England for hyperlinks to defamatory posts - The English High Court has held that a website owner can potentially be held liable for defamatory statements which are published on a website it provides a link to, even if their website does not contain any such defamatory postings itself (Shepherd + Wedderburn)

20 Mar 12: The Pirate Bay proposes airborne servers to evade enforcement action - The Pirate Bay has said that it will experiment with using servers carried on small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air, as a way of evading national law enforcement action.

18 Feb 12: Twitter sued over Hardy Tweet – Twitter is being sued for defamation for a tweet by Marieke Hardy that appeared on Twitter’s homepage, and was copied by some of Hardy’s 60,897 followers and other Twitter users taking part at the time in a worldwide online anti-abuse campaign. Many also commented on the original post in ways that could be construed as defamatory (The Age)

16 Nov 11: Barrage Of Doubts Voiced On US Internet Piracy Bill – An international outcry from open internet proponents has emerged over draft US legislation, HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), on the eve of a hearing on the bill. International critics say the bill would put the United States on the same ground as China with regards to internet filtering, undermining the US argument for internet freedom (IP Watch)

7 Nov 11: The Appropriate Forum and Applicable Law in Claims Against ISPs in the EU – The Court of Justice of the European Union has interpreted the E-Commerce Directive in the context of one claim for breach of privacy brought in a German court against an Austrian website and another privacy infringement claim brought before a French court against a UK newspaper publisher in relation to content posted in the online edition of the paper in English (Dorsey & Whitney)

7 Nov 11: KLNF-Internet-based jurisdiction under the New York long arm statute – Lexology – The New York Court of Appeals revisits the state’s long-arm statute in the context of an internet copyright infringement claim (Kramer Levin)

27 Oct 11: Controversial US Bill Targeting “Rogue Websites” Introduced On House Side – Legislation giving new powers to the government and copyright holders in the United States to unilaterally block payments to or take down websites deemed by US courts to be infringing intellectual property rights has been introduced into the House of Representatives (IP Watch)

24 Oct 11: No liability for defamation for basic hyperlinks, says Supreme Canadian Court – Bloggers, tweeters, webpage owners and other providers and hosts of internet content can breathe a little easier today following a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada that ruled that merely providing hyperlinks to defamatory content cannot make them liable for defamation (Strikeman Elliott)