Scientific publishing houses win copyright case against ISPs

HOYNG ROKH MONEGIER successfully acted for several publishing houses in the field of scientific and academic publications (Elsevier, Springer Nature, ao) against four leading Belgian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (VOO, PROXIMUS, TELENET and BRUTELE).

The case was brought in July 2018 before the Brussels French-speaking company court. The action targeted 2 websites offering access to scientific publications with no authorisation from its rightsholders. Amongst other measures, the vice-president of the Brussels company court ordered the ISPs to block a list of domain names pointing to the «Sci-hub» and «Libgen» websites, which it considered as infringing websites.