In related news: Internet mulls increasing irrelevance of Europe's top court.
Seriously, what are they going to do? Outlaw "unchecked" hyperlinks? Really?(!) Good luck with enforcement, guys!
Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
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Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's more where this legislation is coming from. Some people have built a business on aggregating links or embeddings of copyrighted material and those sites always use the legal defense of "we don't host any of the content so it's not our problem." I imagine this is very frustrating to copyright holders, so it's reasonable that they would seek redress of some kind. Of course, making any copyright-infringin…
If someone published only the names and addresses of known drug dealers in a phone book, the publisher still wouldn't be responsible for any drug deals.
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Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#43Totally off topic, I know, but another white on black web page. It plays havoc with my eyes. /rant
The website is black on white by default, but configurable. You might be using the dark theme.
Hover over the "Main Menu" button at the top, it should open a panel with the option to go back to the default "Dark on Light" theme.
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#44I'm not a fan of the EU at all, and I'm not a fan of unnecessary government regulation. However, this article is FUD.
American readers tend to assume the worst about government regulation of the web, but a charitable reading suggests a pro-copyright ruling might not be completely ridiculous. They'd have to draw a tight boundary to ensure they only cover blatant cases (like the blog which linked to leaked photos), and avoid leaving all users open to accusations of copyright infringement. If they
- limited it to cases where it was clear the intent was to link to copyrighted content the owner expressly didn't want to be linked to (assuming that if the owner hasn't expressed this, content posted online is, by default, OK to link to)
- added exclusions for a) old links, b) user-submitted links, c) links to content which changed
it wouldn't be an unreasonable law. I don't know if the final decision will be that sensible, but I wouldn't rule it out. The cookie regulation wasn't especially onerous and probably helped educate users about the legitimate role of cookies.
I should also point out that this is a judicial decision, not something created by the legislature. The court has to decide how to apply the existing law to this case, and in doing so establishes new case law.
(I made this comment as I don't think the EU can be criticised on the grounds of producing ill-thought-out regulations. As technocratic bureaucracies go, the EU is efficient and works well. Instead, I'm opposed to technocracy on principle, and I think 30-50 years out the EU will have evolved into inefficient Brezhnevism).
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#45The Court of Justice of the EU has some of the most competent IT lawyers of the world. I am sure they already compiled a memo about the definition of "hyperlink". I'd love to see it. What constitutes an hyperlink? * A working ` ` HTML element? So overlay links inside YouTube videos are OK? What about elements with `onclick="window.location="`? * Anything that can point to a URL and is actionable? * A simple URL? Woul…
Courts have been dealing with clever nitpickers like yourself for centuries. All of these would be hyperlinks according to the courts, and if you tried to argue otherwise you'd be told that you were trying to make a "distinction without a difference".
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#46The fact that the court is even considering this is an indication of deep and profound ignorance on their part. There is no binding at all between URLs and content. A web server can serve different content for the same URL on every single request. In fact, most URLs on the web today are like that.
It's their job to consider this as they were asked to answer that question. In the case we are talking about, the content was the same for every request and the linker knew what they were linking to. They would be doing a pretty bad job if they would not think about whether this fact changes anything for at least some cases. What you answered may as well be their answer. We have to wait and see.
> In the case we are talking about, the content was the same for every request
But (by my understanding) the court is not ruling narrowly on this particular case, it is ruling broadly on linking to unlicensed content in general.
> and the linker knew what they were linking to.
How do you prove that? In particular, how do you prove that someone who links to a page knew that the page contains unlicensed content at the time they produced the link?
It might be possible to prove it in some very particular circumstances, but how do you prove it in general?
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's more where this legislation is coming from. Some people have built a business on aggregating links or embeddings of copyrighted material and those sites always use the legal defense of "we don't host any of the content so it's not our problem." I imagine this is very frustrating to copyright holders, so it's reasonable that they would seek redress of some kind. Of course, making any copyright-infringin…
If someone published only the names and addresses of known drug dealers in a phone book, the publisher still wouldn't be responsible for any drug deals.
Aiding and abetting is a federal statute in the US, so I don't think that would be considered 100% OK. The evidence must show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant acted with the knowledge and intention of helping that person commit [specify crime charged].
http://www3.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/367
PS: A more interesting question is if saying we don't host Hollywood crap if you want that go to [the pirate bay] without linking to any specific material.
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whatever response comes back to a request directed at that address is entirely determined by whoever controls the address, and outside the control of the publisher of the hyperlink. It's actually even worse than that. The content can change depending on who is making the request, and can also change from one request to the next. There is absolutely no guarantee that if you check the content of a URL at one time and…
On the other hand, and not that I'd like to be sued for placing links, if the link in my page is something like Avatar Movie Download , the argument that the page had the text of the Holy Bible in it last time I checked might not be very convincing. So I can see how someone might mull.
Have you ever used the Pirate Bay? The links there are actually magnet links (i.e. BitTorrent links) and they just look like random gibberish.
What you get on the Pirate Bay is descriptions of these links. So it's more like:
Avatar HD
Trick is, that description may or may not actually be true. The content is submitted by PB users. The PB, AFAIK, doesn't actually vet this information. And, BTW, not all of the content linked to on the Pirate Bay is actually pirated. You can find Linux distros there, for example.
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#49The Court of Justice of the EU has some of the most competent IT lawyers of the world. I am sure they already compiled a memo about the definition of "hyperlink". I'd love to see it. What constitutes an hyperlink? * A working ` ` HTML element? So overlay links inside YouTube videos are OK? What about elements with `onclick="window.location="`? * Anything that can point to a URL and is actionable? * A simple URL? Woul…
Courts have been dealing with clever nitpickers like yourself for centuries. All of these would be hyperlinks according to the courts, and if you tried to argue otherwise you'd be told that you were trying to make a "distinction without a difference".
He is just curious at the specific definition the court is going to come up with. Were do they draw the line and how would they capture that in words?
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#50Why is Europe wasting their time and everyone's money on this?