Indirect subsidies for Belgian media   Indirect state aid for Belgian media comes mostly from the federal Belgian government. Examples are a zero VAT tariff for newspapers; reduced postal tariffs for newspapers; amounts spent on government advertisements (though these are not only federal);...

This article published in the Belgian law review 'Auteurs & Media' (in French) discusses a court case in Belgium where the administrator of a discussion forum on the internet was sued because of the presence of allegedly libelous or defamatory messages on the forum. The author of the article...

Copyright infringements are widespread on Pinterest. People very frequently 'pin' pictures that they just plucked from the internet, without giving any regard to possible copyright consequences. The problem is that those pictures often are under copyright protection, and are not freely available...

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sent several letters to search engine companies (such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com, Bing, Blekko and DuckDuckGo) asking them to better distinguish between advertising and natural search results. The FTC notes that in recent years, it has become less easy...

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sent several letters to search engine companies (such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com, Bing, Blekko and DuckDuckGo) asking them to better distinguish between advertising and natural search results. The FTC notes that in recent years, it has become less easy...

Do the rules of copyright apply to social media as well? The answer is 'yes, they do', though there is often some more room for flexibility when it comes to their practical application.   Few court cases on copyright and social media   First, it is important to note that there are very...

Les initiatives législatives adoptées au début des années 2000 pour régler la question de la responsabilité des intermédiaires de l’Internet n’ont pas pu anticiper l’évolution constante de la société de l’information. Aujourd’hui, un grand nombre de prestataires de services sur Internet sont...

Google recently announced to make its 'Google News' service "opt-in" instead of  "opt-out" in Germany as of 1 August 2013. This decision by Google is a direct reaction to a new German copyright law that will take effect as of the same date. In practice, this means that Google News...

This week, France made an impressive U-turn on the way it handles P2P piracy on the internet. In a decree of 8 July 2013, the French government overturned the provision in the Intellectual Property Code that allowed a court to suspend one's internet access in case of illegal...

This week, France made an impressive U-turn on the way it handles P2P piracy on the internet. In a decree of 8  July  2013, the French government overturned the provision in the Intellectual Property Code that allowed a court to suspend one's internet access in case of illegal downloading...