Swefilmer case might follow Sanoma / Playboy into the rabbit hole

Followers of the intracacies of copyright law will know that a core requirement of infringement is the communication to a new public.

The global nature of the internet however can be taken to mean that once something is available anywhere online it is therefore not an offence to re-publish it.

In the current Swefilmer case leave has just been granted to apply to the ECJ for a ruling on this point and the case has been suspended.

If this goes the way of Sanoma / Playboy the rights holders are going to need to adjust their approach to IP protection and allocate resources to tracing and stopping the "first seeders" rather than the aggregators even though it is mass distribution that really does the damage to exclusivity.