Policy Observatory
Austrian Patent Law accepts the ownership of patents (and other IP rights) of several natural and/or legal persons as co-owners principally but refers to general civil law all questions concerning the rights of the individual owners with regard to the other co-owners.
On 27 March 2014, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruled that national jurisdiction can order an injunction against an Internet Service Provider (ISP) requiring it to restrict its customers from accessing a website that is placing protected content online without the consent of the rights holder.
Four Austrian providers have continued to fight the details regarding the implementation of the decision before Austria’s supreme court (Oberster Gerichtshof, OGH) – without much success.
This week, Austrian online news platform “Futurezone” obtained a classified copy of the latest decision of the OGH. The document shows that the national supreme court decided to impose the costs of Austria’s blocking scheme on the operators – meaning that these will, in the end, be passed on to the customers.
The Austrian Parliament adopted a resolution, urging the government to act against illegal surveillance by secret services like NSA or GCHQ. Besides that, the Parliament wants to see further steps on an European level to create technological independence for Europe in information and communication technologies.
A court in Vienna declines to hear a legal case involving allegations that Facebook has broken EU data privacy laws. The court rejected the case brought by Max Schrems saying that it lacked jurisdiction in the matter.
In Austria local politicians are slowly trying to increase state surveillance through the new State Protection Act which will increase monitoring. With elections coming up in the Linz region next week the party decided to advertise their policy, but not on the regular outfits most political parties prefer.
Privacy experts of austrian "AK Vorrat" published a handbook on evaluation of anti-terror laws in Austria.
In their presentation they claim that the expansion of public surveillance and missing checks and balances gives the impression that the state does not behave lawfully online and that this impression has effects like terrorism.