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European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

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

#151

Post by Dylan16807 »

smallnamespace wrote: post #148
Dylan16807 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that mean the cheaper the drug is, the more proportional responsibility I have for pointing you the way? Your efficiency tools should not make my actions more illegal.

> _Your_ efficiency tools should not make _my_ actions more illegal. Why would you expect that to be an invariant in the legal system? Your actions take place in the context of the world; the context should affect how someone judges your actions. The key point is whether you personally know (and if the prosecution can show it) that providing a link is tantamount to allowing someone to easily download it.

Context matters, but we should only take links so far. Otherwise we ban all ISPs for facilitating piracy.

They even encourage people going to youtube and watching illegally uploaded videos!

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

#152

Post by icebraining »

jacquesm wrote: post #61
icebraining wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think reproduction is a good line at all; HN could still be guilty if someone posted an unlicensed copyrighted work (say, a news article). Intention and knowledge is the best dividing line, in my opinion, and courts certainly take it into account. HN blindly reproduces what people post, whereas the link in question was posted by the site editors themselves - that's a clear distinction, and in fact many lawsui…

> I don't think reproduction is a good line at all; HN could still be guilty if someone posted an unlicensed copyrighted work (say, a news article). There are 100's of these on HN already. Just a few samples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6262777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10862279

Yes. If HN had no Safe Harbour protection, it could be sued to oblivion for those infringements.

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

#153

Post by smallnamespace »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #151
smallnamespace wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _Your_ efficiency tools should not make _my_ actions more illegal. Why would you expect that to be an invariant in the legal system? Your actions take place in the context of the world; the context should affect how someone judges your actions. The key point is whether you personally know (and if the prosecution can show it) that providing a link is tantamount to allowing someone to easily download it.

Context matters, but we should only take links so far. Otherwise we ban all ISPs for facilitating piracy. They even encourage people going to youtube and watching illegally uploaded videos!

That's why there is explicit safe harbor protection for ISPs.

The safe harbor doesn't come for free, it requires affirmative action on the ISP or Youtube's part to take down content that they know is illegal.

Any hypothetical torrent-sharing site could take advantage of that protection as well, as long as it followed those take-down provisions.

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

#154

Post by icebraining »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #102
icebraining wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need prior permission if it's fair use, and it can still be fair use even if the video is removed (the DMCA ensures it has to be taken down regardless, at least until the uploader sends a counter-notice, and YT goes even beyond that). Still, the 30m for a single joke might be infringing, yes, but so what? If it would be infringement if they served the video from their own servers, why shouldn't it be by emb…

>If it would be infringement if they served the video from their own servers, why shouldn't it be by embedding from YT? // Because then the infringement, if there is one, is YouTube's and not the linker-to-YouTube's.

No, according to the courts, (in the EU) it isn't. My question is: why shouldn't it be?

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

#155

Post by ori_b »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #92
tormeh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the current incarnation of the pirate bay. It doesn't even link to infringing content. It just gives you the ID code of a file that helps you find infringing files. There's no tracker, there aren't even .torrent files. Now look at how many places it's banned. Was this really the best example you could come up with? Because that's clearly the law working as intended.

Even if that's the intent, it's pretty hard to reconcile how copyright law acts nothing like anything else. If I make a website that describes the effects of various designer drugs in glowing terms, and the closest I get to helping you buy some is telling you the chemical ID, I'm very easily on the legal side of things.

> and the closest I get to helping you buy some is telling you the chemical ID, I'm very easily on the legal side of things.

And if there was a tool that would pop out, at no additional cost, an instance of the drug based on the chemical ID, I'm fairly sure that it would be considered distribution. If it wasn't, then within short order, the law would likely be changed to fix that loophole.

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

#156

Post by Dylan16807 »

smallnamespace wrote: post #153
Dylan16807 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context matters, but we should only take links so far. Otherwise we ban all ISPs for facilitating piracy. They even encourage people going to youtube and watching illegally uploaded videos!

That's why there is explicit safe harbor protection for ISPs. The safe harbor doesn't come for free, it requires affirmative action on the ISP or Youtube's part to take down content that they know is illegal. Any hypothetical torrent-sharing site could take advantage of that protection as well, as long as it followed those take-down provisions.

ISPs don't generally have to take down anything, at least not in the US.

Power companies and roads facilitate a whole lot. Zero legal responsibility there. You could make a pretty good argument that a road is responsible for quite a large proportional facilitation when drugs are bought.

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

#157

Post by smallnamespace »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #156
smallnamespace wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why there is explicit safe harbor protection for ISPs. The safe harbor doesn't come for free, it requires affirmative action on the ISP or Youtube's part to take down content that they know is illegal. Any hypothetical torrent-sharing site could take advantage of that protection as well, as long as it followed those take-down provisions.

ISPs don't generally have to take down anything, at least not in the US. Power companies and roads facilitate a whole lot. Zero legal responsibility there. You could make a pretty good argument that a road is responsible for quite a large proportional facilitation when drugs are bought.

Yes, but power companies and roads by and large facilitate legal activity, whereas sharing links to copyrighted content don't.

If you hypothetically ask me to make you a cup of coffee and it helps you stay awake so you can go commit a murder, I shouldn't be going to jail for that, unless my intent was to help you commit murder; and even then, I probably didn't help you very much.

On the other hand, if you come to me and ask me for the number of a local hitman, I should have a pretty good idea that I'm aiding and abetting in something illegal.

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

#158

Post by logicallee »

icebraining wrote: post #150
logicallee wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you and your parent referring to me by "they" (as a gender-neutral term)? What I meant with my comment is that a pretty clear example of copyright would be, for example, hosting and including the copyrighted content. (If the content is literally on the hosting server - posting full text is obviously an example of this. Hosting full images is another example.) A less clear example would be hotlinking. (So that the…

By "they" I meant the judges. Personally, I think not having mens rea as a standard is killing any possibility of user-generated content, since any such site could be convicted if any of its users posted an infringing work. The Safe Harbour provision is one of the few good parts of the DMCA, but it requires judging mens rea, and once you have to judge that, adding linking doesn't have bring any further issues. In Bri…

I'm outside of my league with this mens rea discussion (didn't look into the details) but obviously the fact that you've performed what amounts to copyright infringement through quoting the phrase you discussed, is quite a different problem from this infringement link.

Let's make it explicit. The Pirate Bay is a common site for piracy, so I went there to get you this link:

* https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/15706308/Captain_America__C... What I did was go to the site, then I clicked "top 100" in the header, then I clicked "video | movies" and it was the second link, called "Captain America: Civil War (2016) English BrRip 1080p x264".

Actually you can also find it by googling "Captain America: Civil War (2016) English BrRip 1080p x264" and adding "site:thepiratebay.org" to your query.

Okay, now let's dissect what just happened.

Level1: Firstly, under traditional interpretations of copyright law, the entirety of the present comment (the whole of this comment you're reading) is not infringing on any kind of copyright. I didn't even quote your purposefully short problematic phrase, which you chose because it has been found to be worthy of copyright protection despite its brevity (i.e. similarly protected as a longer work, such as a novel or article). There's nothing copyrighted in this comment, I just authored it out of thin air. I didn't reproduce anything, or include the phrase you held to be protected. I typed it all as a new work.

Level2: Next: I've actually included a link to infringing materials, though. Now am I guilty of some kind of accessory to copyright infringement? My link is actually similar to the article we're discussing. This "level 2" infringement is occurring in the present comment, but if I were to remove the line that starts with an asterisk it would no longer be level 2 infringement. There would no longer be any URL in this comment.

Level3: But, thirdly: what if you remove my link? I've still given you enough information to get to it exactly. The line immediately after the asterisked line tells you exactly how to get there. It just adds 15-45 seconds of inconvenience versus a simple click, and maybe a 20-50% chance that you fail to follow my instructions if you choose to try to do so.

In fact, other than the level-1 line in the sand (which this comment doesn't cross, since I'm not reproducing anything including the short problematic protected phrase you quoted) the rest of the lines in this comment are completely and utterly murky.

Okay, so you've given a tangential example where your comment actually crosses the level-1 line, due to reproducing the phrase "I may ...excellent". Obviously that is an extreme example, but we don't really need to discuss it. Because this present comment (that I'm writing) does not cross that standard. It does, however, cross the level 2 and level 3 standard.

And those lines are murky as hell. There is just nothing there to draw the line at: "THIS is what you're allowed to write; THIS is what you're not."

It has nothing to do with reproducing content - it's about reference to where copyrighted works are available.

I welcome your thoughts as you do know more about this than I do however.

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

#159

Post by Maarten88 »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #47
Maarten88 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be bad for the internet, but it seems fair and also consistent with earlier EU rules, such as the "right to be forgotten". It places an extra burden on the big, commercial sites to remove links (or stop linking on the first place) to content that is considered illegal in the EU. Of course, that may be considered bad for the internet, because most people, as long as they are not the victim, like to see leaked n…

>It places an extra burden on the big, commercial sites to remove links (or stop linking on the first place) to content that is considered illegal in the EU. Why did you insert the word "big" in front of "commercial sites"? There is no such qualification in the court's ruling. Every small blogger who makes a little money through ads now has an obligation to check whether or not the owner of every single linked page o…

> now has an obligation to check whether or not the owner of every single linked page owns the copyrights

That isn't what the ruling says: you can still assume content is legal. Only when you know (or "should have known") it isn't do you need to unlink it.

In this case, geenstijl.nl (which is a professionally-run news site that likes to troll and stir up anything to get traffic) repeatedly linked to leaked playboy pictures uploaded somewhere on the internet. There was no way they could claim innocence. They expressly and repeatedly decided to link content they knew was illegal and would get them a ton of traffic.

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

#160

Post by Dylan16807 »

smallnamespace wrote: post #157
Dylan16807 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISPs don't generally have to take down anything, at least not in the US. Power companies and roads facilitate a whole lot. Zero legal responsibility there. You could make a pretty good argument that a road is responsible for quite a large proportional facilitation when drugs are bought.

Yes, but power companies and roads by and large facilitate legal activity, whereas sharing links to copyrighted content don't. If you hypothetically ask me to make you a cup of coffee and it helps you stay awake so you can go commit a murder, I shouldn't be going to jail for that, unless my intent was to help you commit murder; and even then, I probably didn't help you very much. On the other hand, if you come to me…

I think the problem there is more that you talked to me about finding hitmen, even if I didn't help.

If I merely let you access my directory of all the people in town sorted by job, there probably wouldn't be an issue.

A search engine is not a human. It can't be expected to preemptively filter out suspicious results. Google certainly doesn't.

In the end I just don't think it's right to shut down a site because of its userbase. We don't shut down roads when most of their traffic is criminals. And there's nothing inherently illegal about torrent search engines.

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