PELÍŠKY AND OTHER FILMS MUST DISAPPEAR FROM ULOZ.TO, THE PLATFORM OPERATOR FAILED IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT

Pelíšky and five other Czech films (Ostře sledované vlaky, S čerty nejsou jerty, Vesničko má středisková, Kobry a užovky and Obušku, z sack out!) must disappear from the Ulož.to internet storage. They will not be searchable or downloadable. This follows from the decision of the Constitutional Court (III. ÚS 3077/22), which rejected the constitutional complaints of the operator Uloz.to cloud a.s.

The previous year's judgment of the High Court in Prague, which dealt with the matter in detail and set the boundaries of the interpretation of the Copyright Act, was later confirmed by the Supreme Court. Based on a lawsuit filed by the DILIA agency, the courts ordered the operator of the Uloz.to repository to prevent the downloading of six specific films if people can search for them by title. In legal language, the high court ordered Uloz.to:

...an order to refrain from permitting the downloading of files with specified extensions containing the six specified audiovisual works on the specified websites, so long as members of the public can search for those files by entering the title of the work in the search engine provided by the defendant for the public to do so, and for so long as the property rights in those works continue to exist and so long as the plaintiff exercises those rights as a collective administrator....

In its constitutional complaint, the Ulož.to argued that the obligation imposed on it is contrary to Act 480/2004 Coll., on certain information society services, which precludes the imposition of such an obligation.

However, the Constitutional Court explained in its reasoning that this objection had already been sufficiently dealt with by the courts before it and that it is not here to be another instance in the system of general courts. According to the Court, the operator of a storage facility is a provider of a service which is used by third parties to infringe or threaten the rights of authors of protected works.

In doing so, the judges relied on a decision of the European Court of Justice (C-682/18 and C-683/18), according to which the provider of a so-called hosting service has an obligation to refrain from providing such a service if it is used by third parties to infringe or threaten copyright. This obligation may relate not only to the removal of the infringing content but also to ensuring that no further infringements occur.

Source: lupa.cz