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AG Saugmandsgaard Øe A few days ago, The IPKat  reported  on Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard Øe’s  Opinion  in YouTube  and C-683/18  Cyando . When the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issues its judgment, it will have the opportunity to determine: Joined Cases C-682/18  Whether user-uploaded content (UUC) platforms like YouTube and Uploaded (the latter is a cyberlocker) do perform acts of communication to the public under Article 3(1) of the  InfoSoc Directive   [according to the AG, in principle, they do not] ; Whether the hosting safe harbour in Article 14 of the  E-commerce Directive  is in principle available to these platforms  [according to the AG, it is] ; How to interpret Article 14(1)(a) of the E-commerce Directive and Article 8(3) of the InfoSoc Directive. Possibly (though no questions have been expressly referred on this point), the CJEU will also consider a central aspect of the AG...

The IPKat has an email address,  but not a postal one (Image by Riana Harvey) Does the notion of ‘address’ only refer to one’s own postal address or does it also encompass one’s own email and IP address, as well as telephone number? This, in a nutshell, is the question which the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) had been required to answer in  Constantin Film v YouTube , C-264/19 . The referral, which Germany’s Federal Court of Justice had made, focused on the interpretation of  Article 8(2)(a) of the Enforcement Directive , a piece of EU legislation adopted in 2004. The background national proceedings had originated from the refusal, by YouTube and its parent company Google, to provide film producer Constantin Film with the email and IP addresses, as well as telephone numbers, of YouTube users who had uploaded on that platform unlawful copies of its films  Parker  and  Scary Movie 5 . A few months ago - as The IP...

A public? Over the past several years, the right of communication to the public in art. 3(1) of the  InfoSoc Directive  has progressively and consistently taken centre stage in the EU copyright system. This has been so also given the great number of referrals (over twenty since the 2006 decision in  SGAE ) to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). EU law does not define the concept of ‘communication to the public’. Lacking a definition, the CJEU has sought to determine the meaning and scope thereof in light of the objectives pursued by the InfoSoc Directive, notably that of ensuring a high level of protection of intellectual property (recital 24). Like the other economic rights harmonised in the InfoSoc Directive, the right of communication to the public “should be understood in a broad sense” (recital 23). The two key requirements of art. 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive are a ‘communication’ directed at a ‘public’. A simple example might be a free...