Last week, The European Court issued its decision in the case submitted by two of the founders of Pirate Bay, Neij and Sunde Kolmisoppi v. Sweden. The two had been convicted for copyright infringements. The Court has recently held that copyright enforcement infringes upon freedom of expression (see Dirk Voorhoof’s and Inger Høedt-Rasmussen’s guest post here). This decision confirms this and again shows that copyrights do not necessarily have to yield to freedom of expression when balancing the two. In fact, a very wide margin of appreciation is left to states, which – as several commentators have noted – means that for lack of clear balancing criteria, a certain level of uncertainty will for the moment remain. New cases will have to be awaited to provide further clarity, if they do indeed rise above a very fact- and context-specific asssessment. This decision has already elicited a number of comments, of which I want to refer the reader to two here. First, Jane Lambert reports and analyses the case on NIPC Law Blog. Secondly, the two authors of the earlier guest post on ECHR Blog have written a comment on the decision at KluwerCopyrightBlog. Both well worth reading.
