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European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

searchengineland.com

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Re: European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

#31
The situation is more nuanced than the article suggests.

The ruling is on a matter of law. It isn't a ruling on the guilt of GeenStijl, or anyone else that shares links. It gives the referring court instructions for how to interpret the EU copyright directive, specifically on whether the criminal act of communicating a work to the public without the consent of the copyright owner had occurred.

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands (Hoge Raad) asked the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to rule on in what circumstances should sharing links to infringing content be considered a "communication to the public", with specific attention to how the decision is effected by the prior availability of the content and whether the person sharing the links knew the content was infringing.

The ruling of the CJEU was that when somebody knowingly shares links to infringing content for money, it should be presumed that they knew the content was infringing. This is not strictly an answer to the question, IMO, but it does establish criminal intent.

It is being generally reported that commercial infringing linking has been generally ruled to be "communication to the public". I don't think that's the ruling, although the part of the judgement that isn't the ruling does say that. It would be interesting to know whether the whole judgement, or just the ruling at the end, is considered binding. I tend to assume the later, since the ruling is a repetition of the last paragraph of the judgement, and why would that happen if the judgement was binding?

(Edit: Removed lots of unnecessary words.)

Re: European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

#32
post #7
post #5

I agree, this is bad for the internet. However, some context is missing: The case was in the Netherlands, regarding the website GeenStijl linking to leaked playboy pictures. The court said that 1) GeenStijl made money from it 2) they should and could have know, and most probably knew, that this content was illegal (because they posted it as 'leaked nudes!!'). The combination of these (earning money from content that…

I hope that's the case, and I didn't read the legal text, but how would you protect yourself against that? Would we have to keep tamper-proof screenshots (or archive.is-like snapshots) for each external link posted?

Cryptographic, digital notaries. You could do screenshots and/or HTML pages. It's how I've always done it when I thought what's on a page would be significant and need proof later on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping

EDIT: There's also newer ones that pull the site for you like a MITM to do what we're saying. Startups come and go, though, so I recommend scripted or manual scraping combined with long-running notary who will have evidence when trial happens. :)

Re: European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

#34
post #30
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that be a bad thing though? Those websites are purposefully acting in a way that doesn't respect the copyright of the owner of the content they want to show. That they do this through a third-party host shouldn't be that important.

Yes. As a strong opinion holder in the copyleft philosophy of any and all content, I feel such sites have a right to exist and profit from content as much as the copyright holders (who are not necessarily the creators of said content). But hey, this is just the opinion of some random dude on the Internet.

A random dude on the internet who must know that they their opinion is not current law in any of the countries under discussion?

Re: European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

#36
post #7
post #5

I agree, this is bad for the internet. However, some context is missing: The case was in the Netherlands, regarding the website GeenStijl linking to leaked playboy pictures. The court said that 1) GeenStijl made money from it 2) they should and could have know, and most probably knew, that this content was illegal (because they posted it as 'leaked nudes!!'). The combination of these (earning money from content that…

I hope that's the case, and I didn't read the legal text, but how would you protect yourself against that? Would we have to keep tamper-proof screenshots (or archive.is-like snapshots) for each external link posted?

Screenshots are terrible proof. They were however used in a Swedish piracy court case many years ago. That led to someone building the "proof machine"[1] which created screenshots of BitTorrent clients with any IP you entered. Try it:

[1] http://lekplatsen.org/bevismaskinen/

Re: European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

#38
Techdirt has a good writeup on the new ruling. One of the good points made on Techdirt, is regarding search engines which are obviously for-profit. How in the world would Google keep from linking to material which is violating someone's copyright?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160908/11305735465/terri...

Re: European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

#39
post #2

How can this work? A link is just a reference to a mutable destination and there's no way to guarantee that what's pointed at stays legal after the link was put up. It can change at any time and turn into something illegal, even though the original content was not. I do get the intent here, but it absolutely misses the point. Edit: The ruling acknowledges the target is mutable, but it also says that the poster of a l…

This was exactly my thought. It's also possible to create new URLs leading to the same resource through e.g. a link shortener like Bitly or a proxy service. Pushing this further, would something that is not itself a URL but from which the URL could be recovered, e.g. a hash of the URL, be in violation? Is it transitive, such that a URL from one page linking to another page with the original offending link is also in violation? I'm not a lawyer but this ruling seems to open the floodgates.

Re: European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

#40
Illegal content? I guess they mean copyrighted content? Isn't that pretty much the entire internet? Even this comment is my intellectual property, so will this make you a criminal if you link to this comment without my consent? And isn't youtube making money of copyrighted content, or does youtube have a special deal with the court that only they are allowed to do this?
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