The Legal 500

Norway is on the verge of involuntarily allowing the advertising of alcoholic beverages on television, contrary to the country’s strict alcohol policy. This change, which may take place as a result of pressure from the EU Commission, would have a significant impact for owners of alcohol brands.

New media world = stronger protection of source

Technological measures are increasingly used by rightholders in order to protect their intellectual property rights in digital content. The effect of such measures is to restrict the access to and the use of digital content, by associating pre-defined and self-executing usage rules with it. Within an increasing number of legislations, technological measures enjoy legal protection against circumvention. However, these new rules have been subject to rather severe criticism, especially from a copyright law point of view, the general claim being that anti-circumvention protection threatens to ruin the delicate balance of interests cast in the provisions of copyright law.

1. Introduction
There is an ongoing debate in the Norwegian legal community regarding the right to link to and make copies of copyrighted works made available to the public on the Internet. The debate was sparked by the Norwegian Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the so-called Napster.no case (published in Rt 2005 p41), and by the discussions in the preparatory works to the amendment of the Norwegian Copyright Act, which entered into force on 1 July 2005.