IP, media and privacy law are constantly moving. Its boundaries are challenged daily. What's allowed and what's not. Herein lies the core of our work. Work that keeps challenging and inspiring us.
On July 12 2016 the European Commission adopted the EU-US Privacy Shield, which will replace the earlier Safe Harbour principles. The purpose of this Privacy Shield framework is to guarantee a sufficient level of protection for European citizens' personal data transmitted between the EU and the US.
The European Court of Justice (''ECJ'') has rendered an important judgment in a case about the transfer and storage of European personal data in the United States. The court ruled that the European Safe Harbour Decision does not provide an adequate level of protection of personal data. Based on this agreement organisations such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Twitter got permission to store data from Europeans in the U.S. In total there are over 5000 organisations transferring personal data based on these decision.
Background: Schrems vs. Facebook
The ruling is the final judgment in a case between the Austrian student Maximillian Schrems and Facebook. All Facebook subscribers residing in Europe must sign an agreement with Facebook Ireland, an Irish subsidiary of the American Facebook Inc. The data provided by subscribers to Facebook is transferred, in whole or in part, to servers in the U.S., where it is processed. Schrems lodged a complaint with the Irish supervisory authority (the Data Protection Commissioner). According to Schrems the law and practice of the U.S. do not offer sufficient protecion against surveillance by the public authorities of the data transferred to the country. He aims at the revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013 concerning the activities of the U.S. intelligence services and in particular the National Security Agency (''NSA'').
The Irish authority rejected the complaint on the ground that in a decision of the European Commission (''EC'') in 2000 considered that, under the 'safe harbour' scheme, the U.S. ensures an adequate level of protection of the personal data transferred. Scherms brought the case before the High Court of Ireland, that referred the case to the ECJ.
On 1 July 2015 the new copyright contract rules went into force. As mentioned in our latest update the amendments in the Dutch Copyright Act have consequences for makers and publishers of copyright works. The new rules are therefore important for the contract practice of all media sectors. Are your contracts already up-to-date?
The team of Van Kaam advocaten offers you the opportunity for a Contract Check for both existing and new contracts and/or terms and conditions regarding exploitation, licensing and/or publishing of copyright works.
For Nederlandsmedianieuws.nl Remco Klöters wrote an article about the right to be forgotten. Find a short introduction and a link to the full article (in Dutch) below.
Almost a year since the European Court of Justice ordered Google to guarantee the ‘right to be forgotten’, it is time for an update. I already addressed this matter last year. Is it easy to successfully do such a Google-request? And if it fails, is the Dutch court willing to interfere and uphold the law? On March 31st the Dutch Court of Appeal gave its first judgment in this matter.
The Dutch Privacy Regulator (CBP) has published instructions on how to use Google Analytics in a privacy friendly way by following four steps. Analytics is Google’s service that collects website statistics like visitor traffic and page views. In order to generate this data, small text files are stored on the end users computer; the so called analytical cookies.