On 19 July 2010 the Court of The Hague rendered a judgment in the preliminary relief proceedings instituted by Brein against Ziggo. Brein demanded Ziggo to shut down The Pirate Bay for its subscribers. The judge in preliminary relief proceedings rejected this claim with a remarkable argument and, therefore, in my view, an incorrect outcome.

For many years Brein has been fighting The Pirate Bay, which has been active since 2004 and is the largest BitTorrent website of the world. On this …read more

On July 8, 2010, the European Court of Justice ruled on the circumstances of trademark infringement by the use of Google AdWords. AdWords are search words that, if they are typed in a search engine like Google by an internet user, create sponsored links or advertisements next to the “objective” results that are selected on the basis of algorithm. AdWords are sold by an auction to the highest bidder. The highest bidders gets the top sponsored link in …read more

The Finnish National Conciliator arrived home late at night with his girlfriend, apparently not hindered by the fact that his wife, who was not amused, was also living in the same house. There was a fight: the National Conciliator and his female friend against the wife. The son of the house also received some blows (given by the female friend). The National Conciliator and his female friend were arrested and later convicted. 

The Finnish magazine 7-päviää wrote about this fight and published photographs and the full name of the female friend (who, as the magazine revealed, also appeared to be dancing the samba with yet another man). Was this allowed? Or was this an unlawful invasion of the privacy …read more

In an online publication, a woman and her husband have accused several institutions of doing nothing to stop the sexual abuse of her daughter and several grandchildren by her ex-husband. The couple was ordered in preliminary relief proceedings to remove the online publication from the Internet “to the extent that these articles cannot be retrieved anymore in any way whatsoever by any search request on the Internet”. The order carried a penalty of EUR 2,500 for each day of non-compliance, with …read more

During the World Cup 2010, Bavaria has caused a great upheaval with the Dutch Dress. After the Netherlands - Denmark match, two ‘Bavaria babes’ were even arrested by the South-African authorities. They risked a prison sentence of six months maximum for developing commercial activities in a soccer stadium. It was not exclusively their own initiative to perform a striptease in a group in the stadium: it is said that Bavaria had paid their tickets and accommodation costs and the films of the stripping ‘Bavaria babes’ were placed on YouTube. This is called ambush marketing: profiting from the media attention during a …read more