REMINDER: Today’s Joint IPKat/BLACA live webinar on AG Opinion in YouTube/Cyando

As reported by The IPKat, last week Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard Øe issued his much-awaited Opinion in Joined Cases C-682/18 and C-683/18, advising the Court of Justice of the European Union to rule that:

• Platforms like YouTube and Uploaded (the latter is a cyberlocker) do not perform acts of communication to the public under Article 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive;
• The hosting safe harbour in Article 14 of the E-commerce Directive is in principle available to these platforms;
• Article 14(1)(a) of the E-commerce Directive must be interpreted as meaning that, in principle, the situations mentioned in that provision, namely the situation where a service provider has ‘actual knowledge of illegal activity or information’ and the situation where such a provider is ‘aware of facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent’, refer to specific illegal information;
• Article 8(3) of the InfoSoc Directive must be interpreted as precluding rightholders from being able to apply for an injunction against a provider whose service that consists of the storage of information provided by a user is used by third parties to infringe a copyright or related right only if such an infringement has taken place again after notification of a clear infringement has been provided;
• Article 17 of the DSM Directive is ‘new’ law and not a clarification of the law as it existed prior to the adoption of that directive.