Legal Updates

Rewriting and uploading to an Internet site of an article may constitute a copyright infringement

February 7, 2019
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A man managed a website that compiled paid-for articles. Later, due to illness, he was unable to renew the domain registration in his name and others acquired the domain. The purchasers wrote articles on the same subjects, but in their own words. Moreover, when the new website was launched, due to an employee error, confusing between folders, 38 old articles of the previous owner were uploaded, which were removed after a month and a half, when the mistake was discovered.

The Court accepted the claim and held that there is no doubt that the articles are original works protected by copyright. Copying an article published on a website and making it available to the public on another website without giving credit to its author constitutes an infringement of copyrights. When a file that contains a work is transmitted electronically from one computer to another computer, such as over the Internet, a copy of the work is created on the recipient's computer. When the action is initiated by the recipient, who downloads the work, there is no doubt that he has copied the work to his computer. The said employee knew that he had to rewrite existing articles and had to assume that their content belonged to another person. However, with regard to compensation, all infringements are related and thus constitute a single infringement and not 38 separate ones.