Interesting news (via Techdirt and others) that "a Belgian court" has made some important case law defending the legitimacy of Creative Commons licensing, finding that a breach of the terms of a CC license is a breach of copyright. Good news, and good decision - so it is and so it should be.
Interesting also that this was another landmark ruling with implications for international online copyright law from a Belgian Court of First Instance ("tribunal de première instance"). These are regional courts of which there are about 25 in a kingdom of c11m people, dealing with civil cases and especially appeals above a limit of a couple of thousand Euros. The recent CC ruling came from the tribunal de première instance de Nivelles in the Walloon south-west; previously the Brussels equivalent ruled in favour of Belgian newspaper rights-management company Copiepresse against Google in the famous 2007 case; the same Brussels court ruled that ISP Tiscali could be held responsible for peer-to-peer file-sharing copyright violaions in 2004; and while it was overturned by a higher court at appeal in 2008, another Belgian copyright group succeeded in having Scarlet ISP ordered to install content-filtering software.
Forum shopping is a common enough practice, especially amongst libel litigants abusing the UK's embarassing privacy laws. I've no reason to believe that international litigants are yet going out of their way to make copyright case law before Belgian lower courts - these all seem to be genuinely home-grown cases. But the potential seems to be there, as Belgium's regional Courts of First Appeal seem perfectly comfortable making sweeping precedents that could affect global interpretations of the protections afforded by copyright.
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