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Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

arstechnica.co.uk

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Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#71

Post by lisper »

schrototo wrote: post #70
lisper wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, large corporations using political influence to extend copyright terms effectively forever to prevent works from ever entering the public domain against the express intent of the Founders (at least in the U.S.) aren't exactly the white knights in this story either.

Look, I'm a filmmaker. I believe in copyright (for limited terms), and I believe in using the law as a mechanism to enforce the interests of copyright holders. But making it a crime to link to a page that contains unlicensed material is going way too far IMHO.

(BTW, the sleaze and malware make pretty effective deterrents for the general public to use the PB. You may have noticed that Hollywood is still in business despite the fact that the PB is still operating.)

Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#72

Post by LoSboccacc »

schrototo wrote: post #70
lisper wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intent is the key word here.

Profiting off illegal content is already illegal by itself and all these special cases should be left to courts to decide instead of throwing around overly broad blankets

Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#73

Post by gioele »

bonoboTP wrote: post #38
gioele wrote: post #2

The 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…

> The law does not need formal definitions like that. Law isn't programming, this is what nerds usually forget.

It is not about laws, but about experts opinions in judgments. Courts routinely hire lawyers and experts to redact very formal, technical, philosophical and nitpicky memos about a topic. The CJEU has a resident pool of such experts and they are all very qualified (and variegate in their political orientation).

Obviously those memos are not turned into law. We are talking about judgments here. But those memos are read and used by judges to inform their decisions. I would just love to get access to the memos that are surely being produced for this case.

Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#75

Post by sjclemmy »

klodolph wrote: post #43
sjclemmy wrote: post #35

Totally 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.

I was reading on a mobile. It must default to the white on black theme.

Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#76

Post by deciplex »

lisper wrote: post #71
schrototo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, large corporations using political influence to extend copyright terms effectively forever to prevent works from ever entering the public domain against the express intent of the Founders (at least in the U.S.) aren't exactly the white knights in this story either. Look, I'm a filmmaker. I believe in copyright (for limited terms), and I believe in using the law as a mechanism to enforce the interests of copyrig…

> Well, large corporations using political influence to extend copyright terms effectively forever to prevent works from ever entering the public domain against the express intent of the Founders (at least in the U.S.) aren't exactly the white knights in this story either.

Exactly this. Get back to me when we have a sane copyright regime in the US and, for that matter, the rest of the world. Until then, pardon me if I'm not bothered when people pirate content.

Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#77

Post by germanier »

lisper wrote: post #46
germanier wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, they are going to answer the question in general including the points you brought up. Just categorically denying any liability for links without thoroughly thinking about those points is shortsighted.

Just because in some cases it would be stupid to rule against the linker doesn't mean that it wouldn't be the right thing in other cases. Saying linking in general should never result in violation of the law because is disingenuous.

Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#78

Post by germanier »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #72
schrototo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intent is the key word here. Profiting off illegal content is already illegal by itself and all these special cases should be left to courts to decide instead of throwing around overly broad blankets

And this case is exactly to provide a framework for lower courts to decide intent. In fact, it was a court that asked this question to the CJEU to be able to judge a specific case. It's much better to have clear rules what is allowed and what isn't than operating in a grey area and being dependent on courts deciding in your favor without being able to asses the risk beforehand.

> Profiting off illegal content is already illegal by itself

That is not so easy and depends on your definition of "profiting".

Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#79

Post by germanier »

im2w1l wrote: post #56
bonoboTP wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just because it doesn't have formal definitions doesn't mean it doesn't need them. As GP points out, the implication of the vagueness is that there will be a lot of legal uncertainty.

We absolutely don't want formal definitions for law. While it may seem like a good idea on first sight it would create more problems than it would solve. Lawmakers often forget some specific situations (or there is technical progress that wasn't taken into account) when writing the text of the law (or in this case the formal definition) but it's clear how their intent would be. Judges can decide those specific cases when they are on the table. Nobody can foresee everything.

There are many examples where case law differs from the exact wording of a law for a very good reason.

Re: Europe’s top court mulls legality of hyperlinks

#80

Post by germanier »

rsync wrote: post #69

Ugh. 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 i…

That's exactly the point. I would be very surprised if the court would see a difference between your description and an a-tag. But your description might still aid copyright infringement and it's the question whether the speaker should be liable for that or not.

If I'm standing on the market square and reading today's newspaper out loud that is just speech. But it's also copyright infringement.

This case has nothing to do with the specific form of a link. The question is whether one can infringe copyright by giving a very specific (and automatically executable) description on how to do so.

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