Dutch court rules that for-profit provision of links to unlicensed content is an infringement
Ready for some licensed TV? Can the making available – following payment of an IPTV subscription fee – of streams to unlicensed content amount to an infringement of copyright/related rights? This is the issue that the District Court of Limburg (in Maastricht, The Netherlands) had to address in a recent case that anti-piracy foundation Brein brought against Leaper (also acting as ‘Flickstore’, ‘Dump Die Deal’ and ‘Live TV Store’). Unsurprisingly, the court answered in the affirmative. The judgment (in Dutch) is available here . What is interesting is the reasoning of the court, which also reviewed the interpretation of Article 3 of the InfoSoc Directive as provided by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in its fairly rich case law. Leaper’s service The service offered by Leaper was structured as follows: further to payment by the consumer of the subscription fee, Leaper would send him a unique activation code (this,...