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posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 12 2018, @04:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-dare-you-not-break-the-law dept.

Håkon Wium Lie of WWW fame has written on his blog about being sued for publishing public domain court decisions in Norway. Various volunteers have been publishing this material at rettspraksis.no, which is now down because of the copyright lawsuit against them even though both Norwegian laws and court decisions are exempted from copyright in Norway.

The basis for the lawsuit has been the copyright harmonization effort, Directive 96/9/EC from 1996, which asserts a 15-year copyright on databases and their contents. Not worried that Norway is outside the EU, the judge apparently considered the matter for less than 24 hours and without hearing counter arguments before deciding against rettspraksis.no, taking the site's contents offline, even material older than 15 years, and then slapping the volunteers with a large legal bill. An appeal is underway.

Via Boing Boing : Norwegian court orders volunteers to take down public domain court verdicts and pay copyright troll's legal bills.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @09:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 12 2018, @09:11PM (#692104)

    Based on the law in the books it shouldn't have qualified as an offense under that code, but thanks to a series of bad court decisions, none of which were publicly indexable at the time, they had broadened the law to act as a catch-all for offenses they didn't specifically document, instead of throwing it out as too vague. Result was a year long series of postponements before the case was thrown out.

    After realizing just how bad things had gotten I started avoiding any situation that could even remotely be considered questionable, even as I watched those writing the tickets perform even more grievous offenses on a daily basis.