Protection for protection rights: The Federal Court of Justice on safeguard measures for video games

The German Federal Court of Justice (“BGH”, Videospielkonsolen II) has stated that technical safeguard measures for video games, including games to win real money, fall under the scope of section 95a (3) nr. 3 of the German Copyright Act (“UrhG”), if such measures (in the case decided: Nintendo DS cards for Nintendo DS games consoles) are specifically designed to prevent illegal copies of the games which are played on the consoles.
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District Court of Berlin: Google Germany not responsible for ‘right to be forgotten’-requests

On 21 August 2014, the District Court of Berlin ruled (27 O 293/14, German) that the subsidiary of Google in Germany, Google Germany GmbH, is not responsible for the fulfillment of requests of natural persons under the so called ‘right to be forgotten’, created by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in its much-noticed judgment in May 2014 (C-131/12). The Berlin court held that only the American company, Google Inc., can be regarded as the ‘data controller’ in the sense of European data protection law because only Google Inc. is the operator of the search engine. As a consequence, legal actions must be brought against Google Inc., not the subsidiary in Hamburg. Natural persons who want a link to third party websites to be removed from the search result list following a search made on the basis of a person’s name would therefore have to sue Google Inc. and not the European subsidiary.
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