Why is Europe wasting their time and everyone's money on this?
Because the national court asked the CJEU for a ruling on the EU's rules. That's its job.
Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#62Earlier 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.
If they put it under a section titled "drug dealers", then it would probably be a problem.
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#63The 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".
It cuts both ways though. A judge could easily expand the definition of what a hyperlink was beyond what is reasonable due to vagueness in the law because the "reasonable person" test takes account for the people that think changing their desktop wallpaper is "magic" performed by "computer geniuses."
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#64"The Court itself is composed of 27 judges, one from each member state. Only ten of the current judges (that’s 37 per cent) have served in a domestic appellate court or above within their member state." (2012) -- http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2012/03/07/european-court-...
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#65> Europe's highest court is considering whether every hyperlink in a Web page should be checked for potentially linking to material that infringes copyright, before it can be used. A hyperlink is just an address of some kind that client software interprets in a certain way allowing users to easily send network packets to it. Whatever response comes back to a request directed at that address is entirely determined by…
The rickroll defense. I like it.
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#66The 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…
The law does not need formal definitions like that. Law isn't programming, this is what nerds usually forget. Legal definitions are usually based on common sense and the "flies like a duck, quacks like a duck, ..." principle. A clumsy first approximation: If the purpose and intended use of the thing is to provide access to or greatly help in finding access to the infringing content, then it's "linking" to that conten…
So, for example, having a service which provides a JSON file that contains a list of sites you know to be copyright-infringers, that would clearly be bad.
What if your purpose in publishing that JSON feed was to supply URLs to a content-blocker? Would that change of purpose matter?
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#67Do we have to do this again? Seems every year we go through the exact. Same. Thing.
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#68> Europe's highest court is considering whether every hyperlink in a Web page should be checked for potentially linking to material that infringes copyright, before it can be used. A hyperlink is just an address of some kind that client software interprets in a certain way allowing users to easily send network packets to it. Whatever response comes back to a request directed at that address is entirely determined by…
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Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#69Ugh. For the last time. A hyperlink is not a special kind of descriptor.
You could very easily write a browser plug-in that would take addresses of the form: "there is a website on the Internet that is named example.com and on the server upon which example.com runs, there is a directory named /files, within which there is a regular file named index.html".
See ? So it's just speech. It's not special speech, it's not interesting speech, it's not strange computer speech. It's just plain old speech.
I have been trying, for 14 years[1][2] to erase this distinction with the thought experiment of the "natural language hyperlink" and I had hoped that this "issue" would just disappear.
Do I really have to write that plug-in ? Really ?
[1] http://slashdot.org/story/02/02/06/1559237/slashback-playsta...
Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
None of this is any excuse if the intent is so clearly to profit illegally off of other people's content. Trying to paint Pirate Bay as this altruistic organization that just wants to distribute some Linux distros is such bullshit. The information wants to be free brigade always seem to overlook the tons of sleazy ads and malware that accompanies all of these file sharing sites.