dentical to the content of information which was previously declared to be unlawful, or to block access to that information, irrespective of who requested the storage of that information;

Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market (‘Directive on electronic commerce’), in particular Article 15(1), must be interpreted as meaning that it does not preclude a court of a Member State from:–        ordering a host provider to remove information which it stores, the content of which is identical to the content of information which was previously declared to be unlawful, or to block access to that information, irrespective of who requested the storage of that information;–        ordering a host provider to remove information which it stores, the content of which is equivalent to the content of information which was previously declared to be unlawful, or to block access to that information, provided that the monitoring of and search for the information concerned by such an injunction are limited to information conveying a message the content of which remains essentially unchanged compared with the content which gave rise to the finding of illegality and containing the elements specified in the injunction, and provided that the differences in the wording of that equivalent content, compared with the wording characterising the information which was previously declared to be illegal, are not such as to require the host provider to carry out an independent assessment of that content, and–        ordering a host provider to remove information covered by the injunction or to block access to that information worldwide within the framework of the relevant international law.

Article 7(2) of Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 December 2012 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters must be interpreted as meaning that a person who, considering that his or her rights have been infringed by the dissemination of disparaging comments concerning him or her on the internet, seeks not only the rectification of the information and the removal of the content placed online concerning him or her but also compensation for the damage resulting from that placement may claim, before the courts of each Member State in which those comments are or were accessible, compensation for the damage suffered in the Member State of the court seised, even though those courts do not have jurisdiction to rule on the application for rectification and removal.

Nonetheless, to find a fair balance of interests, the AG proposes to enter into the merits of the private copying levy to ascertain whether, in the light of the overall analysis of the technical chain involving the Cloud service provider, a single process can be identified and so doubling or even tripling the obligation to pay the fair compensation has to be avoided.

n the Padawan case (C-467/08) the Court observed that copying ‘by natural persons acting in a private capacity must be regarded as an act likely to cause harm to the author of the work concerned’,  but it also drew attention to the considerable practical difficulties in identifying the infringements of private users, together with the fact that the harm caused by such individual infringements might simply be de minimis and thus not give rise to a payment obligation. The Court then stated that it is open to the Member States to establish a ‘private copying levy’ for the purposes of financing fair compensation chargeable not to the private persons concerned, but to those who have the digital reproduction equipment, devices and media and who, on that basis, in law or in fact, make that equipment available to private users or who provide copying services for them.