Copyright Violations
According to intellectual property law, which deals with protecting authors’ rights, before a work is reproduced on a website, the website should obtain permission from the author of the work or risk being taken to court. This is true no matter the format of the work—written, drawn, etc.
Television vs. web
In November 2008, the website Wizzgo (an online video broadcasting site) shut down its online service and was ordered by the Paris regional court to pay €440,000 in damages to the French M6 and W9 TV stations. Why? For having copied, reproduced, and made programs from these two channels available online without the TV stations’ consent.
On the lookout for violators…
But this is just one example of many, as these reproductions can be of varying qualities (some being much more difficult to recognize than others). For example, it can be difficult to detect the illegal use of content on a website (texts, slogans, graphic and photographic montages).
For example, the French website pecheur.com (specialized in online fishing equipment sales) recently took a competitor to court after becoming the victim of unfair online reproduction. On December 1st, the competent regional court found the competitor website peche-direct.com guilty of copying content, sales prices, and sales details. Peche-direct.com was ordered to pay pecheur.com €10,000 for having exploited and benefited from pecheur.com’s know-how without its consent and without compensating pecheur.com for using its strategy.
In addition to being forced to pay damages, the court has ordered that both sites publish a release of the judgment in order to reinforce the reparative character and to reestablish the identity of the two sites and two companies in the eyes of consumers.
Sources:
zataz.com
legalis.net
journaldunet.com
Image source: Flickr
Adapted by: Jessica Hartstein
Tags: copyright, intellectual property
