Is the Supreme Court judgment a Pirates’ Charter?

An interesting analysis of last week’s Supreme Court judgment in NLA's case with Meltwater has just been published by Simon Clark and Toby Headdon, our legal team at Berwin Leighton Paisner. They observe that “the Supreme Court’s view does raise some difficult issues which the ECJ will no doubt need to consider carefully. On its view, from a copyright perspective, viewing pirated copies of content online becomes fair game with no disincentive for web users to use legitimate sources. The copyright owner will be left to pursue the source of the pirated material, no doubt located offshore, or seek a blocking injunction against ISPs, which are often circumvented. The decision could be viewed by many as something of an online pirate’s charter”.

No doubt content owners in the music and video areas will be paying the judgment serious attention.

BLP go on to suggest that this could be one more nudge in the direction of pay-walls for news publishers – which will make the media monitoring aspects of the judgment increasingly irrelevant by the time the ECJ rules.

To read more: http://www.blplaw.com/intellectual-property/copyright-designs?view=know-how

David Pugh
Managing Director, NLA

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