Durán-Corretjer SLP

The Court of Justice of the European Union has issued a preliminary ruling on case C-70/10 SCARLET/SABAM referred by the Court of Appeal of Brussels with regard to the matter of the illegal downloading of files protected by copyright via the Internet.

The case originates from a dispute between an Internet service provider, Scarlet Extended SA, and the Belgian company SABAM, which manages for third parties the exploitation of works of music from authors, composers and publishers.

SABAM detected that the users of Scarlet’s services were downloading works from its catalogue via the Internet without authorisation and, therefore, without paying royalties and proceeded with filing a complaint against Scarlet before the Belgian Courts, requesting that means be established to make it impossible to commit those infringements. The Court of First Instance in Brussels upheld the complaint and found Scarlet guilty.

Scarlet filed an appeal against this decision, alleging that the sentence breached the Community Directive on electronic commerce and the fundamental rights of the European Union. The Court of Appeal of Brussels referred the matter to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a preliminary ruling, which has issued its verdict in the aforementioned sentence.

In its sentence, the Court of Justice of the European Union indicates that, although the owners of copyright have the right to prevent third parties from breaching their copyrights and, as such, they can take action against intermediates, such as Internet service providers when the clients of the service providers use those services to infringe copyright, any such actions must respect Community legislation, in particular, the Directive on electronic commerce. This Directive establishes that measures may not be adopted that require Internet service providers to control in a general manner the information that is transmitted via  their networks.

As a result, this sentence establishes that the Community regulations do not allow an obligation to be imposed on Internet service providers to install a system that filters all electronic communications that pass through their services and that correspond indiscriminately to all of their clients, as a preventative measure, at their own cost and for an unlimited period of time.

However, this sentence shall not prevent measures from being taken against specific individuals or companies that perform illegal downloads.

Further information on the full sentence may be found on the following link:

http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/form.pl?lang=EN&Submit=rechercher&numaff=C-70/10

This sentence is of particular importance for those companies which are dedicated to providing Internet services to third parties.