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Historical victory in the legal case to block access to an illegal file-sharing website

2019.04.30

In 2019, Andrius Iškauskas together with his team achieved a ground-breaking legal victory in the Lithuanian case law in a copyright infringement defence case.

The Supreme Court of Lithuania issued a ruling forcing internet providers to block, at their own expense, access to the illegal content sharing website linkomanija.net in a litigation that lasted more than three years. The court ordered the defendants in the aforesaid case – the country’s major internet providers (“Telia Lietuva”, “Bitė Lietuva”, “Lietuvos radijo ir televizijos centras”, “Cgates”, “INIT”, “Balticum TV”, “SPLIUS” and “Penkių kontinentų komunikacijos centras”) to block access to the piracy website.

It was the first time that the Lithuanian courts formulated a requirement compelling the internet providers to impede access to a piracy site. The defence designed their litigation strategy based on the analysis of the case law of the European Court of Justice and that of other European countries.

This was probably the last case of this kind in the Lithuanian courts since illegal content sharers can be blocked without court order as from 1 April 2019. We have been actively involved in developing regulatory measures that permit the blocking of such sites and we have taken a strong stance in support of the interests of content creators.

In this copyright infringement case, Iškauskas and his colleagues represented LATGA, the country’s largest national association of collective administration of copyright and related rights.