Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Menlo Security, a malware and phishing prevention startup, announced a $100 million Series E today on an $800 million valuation. The round was led by Vista Equity Partners with help from Neuberger Berman, General Catalyst, JP Morgan and other unnamed existing investors. The company has now raised approximately $250 million.

CEO and co-founder Amir Ben-Efraim says that while the platform has expanded over the years, the company stays mostly focused on web and email as major attack vectors for customers. “We really focused on a better kind of security outcome relative to the major threat factors of web and email. So web and email is really how most of the world or the enterprise world at least does its work, and these channels remain forever vulnerable to the latest attack,” Ben-Efraim explained.

He says that to protect those attack surfaces, the company pioneered a technology called web isolation to disconnect the user from the content and send only safe visuals. “When they click a link or engage with a website, the safe visuals are guaranteed to be malware-free, no matter where you go or you end up,” Ben-Efraim said.

With a valuation of $800 million, he’s proud having built his company from the ground up to this point. He’s not quite ready to discuss an IPO yet, but he expects to take this large influx of cash and continue to grow an independent company with an IPO perhaps three years out.

With an increase in business and the new capital, the company, which has 270 employees of which around 70 came on board this year, hopes to continue to grow at that pace in 2021. He says that as that happens the security startup has been paying close attention to the social justice movements.

“As a management team and for myself as a CEO, it’s an important topic. So we were paying close attention to our own diversification goals. We want Menlo to become a more diversified company,” Ben-Efraim said. He believes the way to get there is to prioritize recruiting channels where they can tap into a wider variety of potential recruits for the company.

While he wouldn’t discuss revenue, he did say in spite of the pandemic, the business is growing rapidly and sales are up 155% in terms of net new sales over last year. “The momentum for that being customers specifically in critical infrastructure, financial services, government and the like are seeing an uptick in attacks associated with COVID, and are looking at security as essential in an area that they need to double down on. So despite the financial difficulties, that’s created a bit of a tailwind for us strangely in 2020, even though the world economy as a whole is clearly being challenged by this epidemic,” he said.

Amazon on Thursday announced a lawsuit against over a dozen bad actors, including online influencers and other businesses, who attempted to evade Amazon’s anti-counterfeiting measures by promoting luxury counterfeit products on social media sites, like TikTok and Instagram, as well as on personal websites, then using Amazon seller accounts to fulfill those orders.

The suit alleges that defendants, Kelly Fitzpatrick and Sabrina Kelly-Krejci, conspired with sellers to run a scheme that involved posting side-by-side photos of a generic, non-branded product which could be found on Amazon, and a luxury counterfeit product. The text on the posting would read “Order this/Get this.”

The “Order this” pointed to a generic product being falsely advertised on Amazon. “Get this,” meanwhile, was referencing the luxury counterfeit products the consumer would receive instead.

Image Credits: Amazon court filing

By only posting generic product photos on Amazon.com directly, the defendants and the sellers they worked with, were aiming to bypass Amazon’s anti-counterfeiting measures while making claims about the counterfeit goods elsewhere across social media and the web. They also promoted the high quality of their luxury counterfeit goods using videos on Instagram, TikTok, and personal websites, and sent users to Amazon and other e-commerce websites, like DHgate, to transact.

Of note in this case is the fact that Fitzpatrick had been a member of Amazon’s Influencer Program while the counterfeiting scheme was underway. From Nov. 23, 2019 through March 6, 2020, she participated in the program under the username Kellyfitz02-20. When Amazon detected her activities, she was banned from the program and it closed her Associates account.

She then attempted to open new Associate accounts and continued to advertise the counterfeit items on social media, where she directed her followers to her own website for purchases, as well as to other e-commerce sites.

Instagram had shut down Fitzpatrick’s prior accounts, but she would create new ones when that occurred.

Though Fitzpatrick made her current Instagram account private, her website is still online where it shows her promoting the so-called “hidden links” on Amazon where consumers could buy the counterfeits.

Image Credits: styleeandgrace.com

Similarly, Kelly-Krejci used her website to direct users to “hidden links” on Amazon where they could buy counterfeit products, saying in one video, she “know[s] some people feel weird ordering from hidden links but in this case you will get something fabulous.”

Image Credits: budgetstylefiles.com

The lawsuit alleges the defendants ran their schemes from around November 2019 through the filing of the complaint.

Investigators working on Amazon’s behalf were able to confirm the scheme by placing orders through the links and receiving the advertised counterfeit goods. The court filing shows several examples of these items, which included wallets, purses, belts, and sunglasses, which were designer dupes of brands like Gucci and Dior.

Among the other defendants in the case are businesses and sellers in China who helped source the dupes. In some cases, the sellers took steps to hide their identities and whereabouts from Amazon by using fake names and contact information and unregistered businesses, Amazon says..

Amazon has been working over the past several years to take a harder stance on counterfeiting, having acknowledging the practice harms consumer trust in its online store. In 2017, it launched the Amazon Brand Registry, which gives a rights owner tools to proactively locate and report infringing items. The following year, it launch a product serialization service, Transparency, that helps to eliminate counterfeits for enrolled products.

And last year, Amazon launched Project Zero, a self-service counterfeit removal tool for brands to remove counterfeit product listings on Amazon in minutes. Over 10,000 brands are now enrolled.

The retailer has increasingly engaged in lawsuits against counterfeiters as well, to dissuade others from participating in counterfeiting schemes.

The current lawsuit asks the court to ensure the defendants are barred from ever advertising, promoting and selling on Amazon, opening Amazon Vendor, Selling, and Associate accounts, aiding or abetting counterfeiters, and pay damages, attorneys’ fees, and other relief.

It’s hard to think back to the Vision Fund era today, given the oddities that 2020 has brought. But SoftBank’s gravity-bending investment vehicle only stopped investing last September, ending its disbursement of huge blocks of cash from a total committed capital pool worth nearly $99 billion.

The Vision Fund was a wrecking ball, smashing into any company it chose with a big check and demands for rapid growth. By the time it was done investing, the first Vision Fund had deployed around $100 million every day of its existence, according to TechCrunch calculations.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But even before SoftBank and eccentric leader Masayoshi Son were done cutting checks, things were going awry. TechCrunch compiled a list of issues that cropped up inside the portfolio in 2019, including layoffs at the overstuffed Wag, Uber’s lackluster IPO, turmoil at Brandless, the enormous WeWork IPO fiasco and its ensuing chaos, executive changes at Compass, layoffs at Fair and Katerra and OneConnect’s IPO fizzle.

2020 picked up where 2019 had left off, with more issues at OYO, layoffs at Zume Pizza and some public flak for breaking terms sheets.

By this April, SoftBank admitted that it was on track to take stiff losses from its Vision Fund portfolio, which, when combined with other investing losses, pushed the company into a rare loss for the year.

And then things got better: SoftBank’s Vision Fund had a much better last six months than you probably guessed, and we need to understand why.

So, into the data we go, to have some laughs at the art that SoftBank cannot leave out of its reporting, and learn a bit about what changed for the Vision Fund family.

A comeback

Before we get to the turnaround, we need to understand how much damage the Vision Fund caused its parent company earlier this year.

To grok the impact that the Vision Fund’s rough patch caused SoftBank Group during the 12-month period ending March 31, 2020, we can glean all that we need from a single chart. Here’s SoftBank Group’s net income through its fiscal 2019:

The period’s loss stands out like a sore thumb.

What drove the deficit? A ¥1.9 trillion segment loss from the Vision Fund, produced by declines in the “fair values of Uber and WeWork and its three affiliates,” along with the fair value of “other portfolio companies decreas[ing] significantly in the fourth quarter primarily due to the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak.”

It was brutal and humiliating to have raised so much money and invested it with such confidence only to have so many deals go sideways.

At the end of its fiscal 2019, SoftBank Group reported that the Vision Fund held 88 investments that had cost it $75.0 billion. The whole group was worth $69.6 billion, “excluding exited investments.”

Fast forward to the company’s most recent report, covering the following six months — a period ending as September came to a close — and it’s hard to compare the two sets of results: SoftBank Group was back in the black, posting solid year-over-year gains from the same period of its preceding fiscal year.

Of course, SoftBank Group is far more than the Vision Fund — the company is a Japanese conglomerate with a huge telecom business that makes lots of money. But we care about its startup investing performance, so how did the Vision Fund itself impact its numbers in the six months concluding in September 2020?

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.

Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Dublin will capture how the city is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to do it again).

We’d like to know how Ireland’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and, generally, how your thinking will evolve from here. Obviously, most VCs are in Dublin, but we don’t want to miss out on those based elsewhere.

Our survey will only be about investors, and only the contributions of VC investors will be included. More than one partner is welcome to fill out the survey.

The shortlist of questions will require only brief responses, but the more you can add, the better.

You can fill out the survey here.

Obviously, investors who contribute will be featured in the final surveys, with links to their companies and profiles.

What kinds of things do we want to know? Questions include: Which trends are you most excited by? What startup do you wish someone would create? Where are the overlooked opportunities? What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? How is your local ecosystem going? And how has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy?

This survey is part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors.

https://techcrunch.com/extra-crunch/investor-surveys/

For example, here is the recent survey of London.

You are not in Dublin, but would like to take part? That’s fine! Any European VC investor can STILL fill out the survey, as we probably will be putting a call out to your city next anyway! And we will use the data for future surveys on vertical topics.

The survey is covering almost every European country on the continent of Europe (not just EU members, btw), so just look for your country and city on the survey and please participate (if you’re a venture capital investor).

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com

You might not have heard of Sergei Toshin, but you should know his work.

Toshin is a 23-year-old security researcher in Moscow who focuses largely on mobile app security. With his knowledge of what different mobile security flaws looked like, Toshin built a custom Android mobile app vulnerability scanner to quickly and automatically find vulnerabilities in an app’s code, he told TechCrunch.

The scanner works by decompiling the Android app and running through the source code line-by-line — just as a human would — and detecting possible flaws in code where a vulnerability could be triggered. It takes a set of rules, which effectively describes different kinds of vulnerabilities, and searches for vulnerable code that meets those conditions, Toshin said.

Once the scanner finishes, it spits out a report describing where the vulnerabilities are in the code.

It was using this scanner, which he developed over the course of the last two years, that he was able to speed up the process of finding bugs.

“To participate in a bug bounty, I would just download the app and copy the vulnerabilities identified in the vulnerability report,” he said.

In August, he revealed details of an Android vulnerability that allowed malicious apps to steal sensitive user data from other apps on the same device. Two weeks later, he dropped details of a bug in TikTok’s Android app that could have led to hijacking of user accounts.

These are just two out of hundreds of security bugs he has reported to companies through their bug bounty programs, a way for researchers to warn companies of potential issues while getting paid for their findings.

“It occurred to me to launch a startup and begin helping other companies find vulnerabilities in their mobile apps,” Toshin told TechCrunch.

One of the vulnerability scanner’s reports for an Android app. (Image: Oversecured)

And that’s how Oversecured was founded. But how Toshin funded his startup was somewhat unconventional.

What’s unusual about Oversecured is not that it’s self-funded, but it launched out of a product that effectively paid for itself. Toshin netted more than $1 million in bug bounties in a year using his scanner, in large part thanks to Google’s security rewards program, which pays security researchers far more for security bugs found in Android apps with over 100 million installs.

Oversecured is not yet profitable, but Toshin has also not taken any venture-backed funding to date. The company now has about five developers, as well as designers and translators as all efforts focus on building and improving the scanner.

The startup so far only supports scanning Android apps. Toshin said the scanner is open to bug hunters and security researchers, who can pay to scan each app — with five scans tossed in for free.

But Toshin is betting big on allowing enterprise customers to buy access to the scanner and integrate it with their development tools. Oversecured launched its B2B offering last week, allowing app makers to integrate the scanner directly into their existing app development processes to find bugs during coding.

Toshin said that enterprise customers will soon get support for scanning Swift source code for iOS apps.

Oversecured joins a number of other established app security companies in the space. But Toshin is confident that his technology stands among the crowd.

“It’s important to find everything,” he said.

Read more:

• TikTok fixes Android bugs that could have led to account hijacks
• Android security bug let malicious apps siphon off private user data
• This Week in Apps: Elections’ impact on the app store, new app privacy requirements, iOS 14.2 arrives
• True, the social networking app that promises to ‘protect your privacy,’ exposed private messages and user locations

Statespace, the training platform for gamers, has today announced the close of a $29 million Series B financing led by Khosla Ventures. This comes just six months after the announcement of a $15 million Series A funding, also led by Khosla.

Founder and CEO Wayne Mackey described the funding as pre-emptive as the company experiences a growth spurt alongside the broader gaming industry. Statespace has jumped from 2 million registered users and 500,000 monthly active users in May to 5 million total registered users and 1.5 million monthly active users today.

Statespace launched out of stealth in 2017 with a product called Aim Lab. Aim Lab runs on Steam and replicates the physics of popular video games to give users a training environment to practice their aim. Moreover, Aim Lab (which was developed by neuroscientists) measures visual acuity and lets users know their strengths and weaknesses.

Image Credits: Statespace

The company also has plans to launch a product called The Academy, which lets users pay for courses that are taught by top streamers and players. These players include KingGeorge (Rainbox Six Siege), SypherPK (Fortnite), Valkia (Overwatch), Drift0r (CoD) and Launders (CS:GO).

The tech behind Aim Lab can be applied to a number of use cases in the gaming world. For one, pro esports organizations don’t necessarily have the breadth of data they want to make decisions on roster formation, recruiting, etc. Statespace partnered with the Pro Football Hall of Fame to develop a “Cognitive Combine,” giving players an overall score based on a wide range of skills outside of any specific game.

There are also medical applications for the tech. The company has applied for a grant alongside several universities to work on a commercial application for stroke rehabilitation, and believes that its tech can be used to help with cerebral palsy rehabilitation.

Statespace has also grown its team to more than 40 people, and interestingly around one quarter of those people do not have a college degree.

“Internally, we talk about being like the island of misfit toys as a company,” said Mackey. “Give us all the underdogs and weirdos and people that traditionally wouldn’t have this type of career or a shot and let’s put them all together and win.”

The Statespace team is 30 percent female, 28 percent people of color and five percent Black.

Mackey explained that growth is the number one priority of the company, which has yet to determine a primary revenue channel. Statespace is currently partnering with teams and big streamers to develop skins that are for sale, but Aim Lab is free to use.

Ford revealed Thursday the E-Transit, a configurable all-electric cargo van that it’s betting will be the new go-to workhorse for commercial customers.

The E-Transit is just one piece of the company’s $11.5 billion investment in electrification. But it could be its most important one. Ford has largely focused its electrification efforts on the consumer market, notably the Mustang Mach-E, which will hit dealerships later this year. 

The E-Transit aims to further secure Ford’s dominance in the cargo van market. Its popular combustion engine Transit vans have a 40% market share in its category, but there’s more opportunity with EVs. Ford estimates the entire BEV commercial van market is 1.1 million commercial vans.

The E-Transit will come in eight configurations, including three roof heights and three lengths as well as a cargo van, chassis cab and cutaway models. The vehicle is also comes standard with a 12-inch touchscreen and Ford’s Sync 4 infotainment system with voice and navigation, as well as an option to provide 2.4 kilowatts of power for tools. All the vehicles have an eight-year, 100,000-mile electric vehicle component warranty. 

Ford shared details Thursday of its low-roof cargo van, which will start at under $45,000 for U.S. fleet customers. This variant will come with a 67 kilowatt-hour battery that can travel 126 miles on a single charge. tThe spec sheet shared by Ford indicates that the medium roof height, long version of the E-Transit will get 116 miles on a charge and the extended will have 108 miles of range.

Image Credits: Ford

The E-Transit, which will have both AC and DC fast charging, will come standard with a Ford Mobile Charger that can plug into a normal 120-volt outlet or into a 240-volt outlet for faster charging. The automaker is also going to sell a connected charger station that will be capable of fully charging the van in 8 hours. 

The ranges may seem low for the Tesla converted. But Ford argues that commercial customers are price sensitive and know exactly what they need.

“Commercial customers stand out because they view their vehicles through the lens of total cost of ownership,” Yaro Hetman, global marketing director for electric trucks, vans and commercial vehicles told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “In other words, they want to get the job done. effectively as possible, but they don’t want to pay for capability that’s over and above that, and that applies to range as well.

Hetman said the company analyzed more than 30 million of commercial miles traveled in North America with its existing combustion engine Transit vans. Ford learned that the average commercial van in the U.S., covers 74 miles a day.

There will no doubt be customers who want more. Hetman said to expect future announcements on versions with greater range and capability.

Ford has also touted the cheaper maintenance costs of the E-Transit, which is estimates will be 40%  less than the average scheduled maintenance costs for a gas-powered 2020 Transit over eight years/100,000 miles.

Ford is betting on the dual product launches of the upcoming E-Transit cargo van and the all-electric F-150 truck will help it carve out a share of the EV market that promises to be both competitive and potentially lucrative as cities place stricter regulations on gas-powered vehicles. 

But with the all-electric F150 not arriving until mid-2022, all eyes and hopes are on Ford’s cargo van. The company has poured in details aimed at fleet customers, features like a standard driver assist with road edge detection, a drowsiness driver alert and pre-collision assist with automatic emergency braking. There are, of course, add ons, including an upgrade to its advanced driver assistance system that includes adaptive cruise control, speed sign recognition with navigation and automatic speed limiting device as well as a host parking and reversing aids.

Image Credits: Ford

There’s also an embedded modem paired with Ford Telematics or Ford Data Services can help improve fleet operations.

Fleet management tools that help with productivity, driver safety and driver coaching are all potentially attractive to customers, according to Julius Marchwicki, COO of Ford Commercial Solutions.

“Our tools are now going to be able to help you with things like charging reports, understanding how your electric vehicles are performing and being able to remotely precondition it so that you’re able to maximize the range before or before that van goes out on the road for the workday,” Marchwicki said in a recent interview.

Solo.io, a Cambridge, MA service mesh startup, announced some big changes to its approach today with a full-stack platform of services aimed squarely at the enterprise. The culmination of this will be Gloo Mesh Enterprise, a new product that will be available in Beta by the end of the year.

Service meshes are part of a cloud native, containerized approach to development that enable micro services to communicate with one another.

Idit Levine, founder and CEO at Solo, says that she began by creating individual components since launching the company in 2017 because she knew that it was early for service meshes. Today’s announcement is about bringing all of these components the company has created into a more coherent and connected enterprise product.

While she was worried at first that the pandemic would have a negative impact on business, she says that her company has been busier than ever and today’s announcement is really about giving customers what they have been asking for throughout this tumultuous year.

Most of Solo’s customers are running Kubernetes and they needed some missing pieces that Solo was happy to provide for them. The first problem is the primary reason the company started, which was to manage service meshes, and Gloo Mesh, which is based on the open source Istio service mesh, helps developers manage their service mesh clusters.

Another problem involved running containers at the edge, which required an API gateway. To that end, the company announced Gloo Edge, an API gateway built on the Envoy Proxy, an edge service proxy. Running applications at the edge means they get the resources they need to improve performance and save bandwidth.

The third piece is called Gloo Portal. This provides a centralized, self-service catalog of services that developers can tap into as they are building their applications. The final piece is Gloo Extensions, which provides a way for developers to access or build extensions called web assembly modules.

All of these pieces are available as open source, but companies that want additional functionality and support and a way to connect all of these pieces will need to buy the enterprise product. Among the additional features in the enterprise version is the ability to apply roles to the APIs in Gloo Edge to control who has access. Gloo Mesh users get production Istio support including updates and patches. It also includes a dashboard for managing clusters and developer tools for building web assembly pieces in Gloo Extension

The company has raised over $36 million, according to Pitchbook data. The most recent deal was $23 million in September. Levine says the startup has several dozen large customers at this point and 35 employees. She said she is actively hiring and expects to be at 50 soon.

The Los Angeles and New York-based venture firm M13 has managed to nab former Techstars LA managing director, Anna Barber, as its newest partner and the head of its internal venture studio, Launchpad.

Designed to be a collaborative startup company incubator alongside corporate partners, Launchpad focuses on developing new consumer tech businesses focused on M13’s main investment areas: health, food, transportation, and housing.

For Barber, the new position is the latest step in a professional career spent working both inside and outside of the tech industry.

Barber got her first taste of the startup world when she was poached from McKinsey to join one of the several online pet supply stores that cropped up in 1999. From her position as the vice president of product at Petstore.com, Barber got her taste of the startup world… and left it to become a talent manager and the co-founder of the National Air Guitar championships (no word if she managed air guitar talent).

Prior to launching the Techstars LA incubator program, Barber founded ScribblePress, a retail and digital publishing app, which was sold to Fingerprint Digital.

Anna Barber, partner, M13. Image Credit: Raif Strathmann

At M13, Barber will be working to recruit entrepreneurs to work collaboratively on developing startup consumer businesses that align with the strategic interests of M13’s corporate partners, like Procter & Gamble.

“We will be bringing in founders in residence who will come in without an idea,” Barber said of the program. “We’re starting with a blank sheet of paper and building teams in partnership with entrepreneurs and in partnership with corporate partners who will bring their perspective and their IP. “

The EIRs will receive a small stipend and equity in the business, Barber said.

The starting gun for M13’s Launchpad  program was in 2019 and the program currently has managed to spin up three startups. There’s Rae, an developer of affordable women’s wellness products; and the beauty tech company OPTE; Kindra menopause products; and Bodewell for sensitive skin care, which were all developed alongside Procter & Gamble Ventures.

M13, for its part, is developing a strong team of women partners who are investing at the firm. Barber will join Lizzie Francis and Christine Choi on the investment team, something that Barber said was especially exciting.

“There is no better place for M13’s Launchpad than Los Angeles and no better person to lead it than Anna. M13 is home to a creative, diverse community of entrepreneurs and operators who want to make the world better by applying innovation in everything from media to biotech, prop tech to food,” said M13 co-founder Carter Reum. “We are excited for Anna to continue to lead LA’s center of entrepreneurs, mentors and investors with a rigorous Launchpad program and more exceptional partners and cohorts.”

Austria’s Supreme Court has dismissed Facebook’s appeal in a long running speech takedown case — ruling it must remove references to defamatory comments made about a local politician worldwide for as long as the injunction lasts.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the ruling.

Green Party politician, Eva Glawischnig, successfully sued the social media giant seeking removal of defamatory comments made about her by a user of its platform after Facebook had refused to take down the abusive postings — which referred to her as a “lousy traitor”, a “corrupt tramp” and a member of a “fascist party”. 

After a preliminary injunction in 2016 Glawischnig won local removal of the defamatory postings the next year but continued her legal fight — pushing for similar postings to be removed and take downs to also be global.

Questions were referred up to the EU’s Court of Justice. And in a key judgement last year the CJEU decided platforms can be instructed to hunt for and remove illegal speech worldwide without falling foul of European rules that preclude platforms from being saddled with a “general content monitoring obligation”. Today’s Austrian Supreme Court ruling flows naturally from that.

Austrian newspaper Der Standard reports that the court confirmed the injunction applies worldwide, both to identical postings or those that carry the same essential meaning as the original defamatory posting.

It said the Austrian court argues that EU Member States and civil courts can require platforms like Facebook to monitor content in “specific cases” — such as when a court has identified user content as unlawful and “specific information” about it — in order to prevent content that’s been judged to be illegal from being reproduced and shared by another user of the network at a later point in time with the overarching aim of preventing future violations.

The case has important implications for the limitations of online speech.

Regional lawmakers are also working on updating digital liability regulations. Commission lawmakers have said they want to force platforms to take more responsibility for the content they fence and monetize — fuelled by concerns about the impact of online hate speech, terrorist content and divisive disinformation.

A long-standing EU rule, prohibiting Member States from putting a general content monitoring obligation on platforms, limits how they can be forced to censor speech. But the CJEU ruling has opened the door to bounded monitoring of speech — in instances where it’s been judged to be illegal — and that in turn may influence the policy substance of the Digital Services Act which the Commission is due to publish in draft early next month.

In a reaction to last year’s CJEU ruling, Facebook argued it “opens the door to obligations being imposed on internet companies to proactively monitor content and then interpret if it is ‘equivalent’ to content that has been found to be illegal”.

“In order to get this right national courts will have to set out very clear definitions on what ‘identical’ and ‘equivalent’ means in practice. We hope the courts take a proportionate and measured approach, to avoid having a chilling effect on freedom of expression,” it added.