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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

#171

Post by logicallee »

icebraining wrote: post #163
logicallee wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

you do know more about this than I do however. Maybe, but remember that a little knowledge is more dangerous than none, and it's all I have :) That said, from what I can tell, I don't think it's murky - according to the court, all of those levels would be infringing.

>I don't think it's murky - according to the court, all of those levels would be infringing.

You're saying that if I were to say "it's easy to find a blue ray rip of Captain America" (this is the whole of my reference, exactly in these words) then I would be guilty of copyright infringement? Because that is one of the lines in the sand. I don't see it. But telling you what to Google is nearly that.

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

#172

Post by smallnamespace »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #160
smallnamespace wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We don't shut down roads when most of their traffic is criminals

Do you have an example of a road mostly used by criminals which the relevant authorities aren't trying to shut down? One where the criminals aren't actively bribing the authorities, obviously.

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

#173

Post by soufron »

kstrauser wrote: post #77
soufron wrote: post #71

That's not what the decision said. At all. The decision said that a link to illegal content can be illegal in itself when 1. it's done for monetary purposes, and 2. when the person creating the link was aware of the illegal nature of the content being linked. But who would have doubted about that? Did you really think you could create links to illegal content for money and get away with it? On the other side, it clar…

> Did you really think you could create links to illegal content for money and get away with it? Yes, and that's a horrible ruling. Almost everything can be construed as "for money". Are you a newspaper with paid subscribers? Everything you link is "for money". Do you have a Google ad on your hobby blog? Technically, you're getting paid for it. Someone will make the argument that you're driving traffic to your ad-spo…

1. not everything is done for money, I see no ads on this website for example

2. If your question is to know wether a journalist would be concerned by the decision, it's easy to see he would not.

3. If the linker is linking to illegal content knowingly, and because he hopes a gain from it, I don't see how he would not be guilty. In your example, you would be guilty as hell.

4. Google don't know what is legal and what is illegal as long as nobody told them. They're protected in Europe as intermediaries by the Directive at least.

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

#174

Post by soufron »

manmal wrote: post #140
GunboatDiplomat wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because hobbies cost money? It's not their day job, they're just looking to maybe pay for their hosting and a little more, generally.

If you can prove that you only took as much money as required for hosting (and donated the rest), a court might be fine with that.

Exactly.

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

#175

Post by posterboy »

madgar wrote: post #34
shiven wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If what is and what isn't law was that clear cut, the case wouldn't escalate to the European Court of Justice. Add to that that laws are arbitrarily incoherent and therefore the decision is just one possible interpretation of the law, albeit one that will be upheld.

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

#176

Post by posterboy »

Natanael_L wrote: post #133
seszett wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That the host is breaking the law doesn't mean the site that links to the host isn't breaking it as well.

If it already is accessible to that public, a mere pointer shouldn't be illegal.

It could be counted as advertising illegal activities, which is often illegal, too.

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

#177

Post by kuschku »

GunboatDiplomat wrote: post #145
kuschku wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, we shouldn’t have different internets for different countries. But instead of applying US law globally, we might want to instead apply EU or Chinese law globally. It can’t be that laws that only 300 million people can vote for are applied to billions of people.

I'd rather the laws of a country which enshrines freedom of speech to a greater degree than any other be the set of rules governing the internet than the laws of a place where you can be fined for jokingly giving a Nazi salute.

Yet I’m able to make a Nazi salut online, but not show my breasts?

Your "freedom of speech" is still only allowing what your culture wants.

The internet is something where all cultures collide, so giving any one culture control is just stupid.

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

#178

Post by pbhjpbhj »

bediger4000 wrote: post #169
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is supposed to be a temporary monopoly granted by the demos , the reason for which is to enrich the space of published artistic works. It's so sad to see it perceived as an imposition by authorities. Not wrong, just sad.

The "temporary" part seems to have disappeared, at least in the USA. Very, very little material enters the public domain every year. The rules about copyright (instant when fixed in tangible form, long lasting, can last for years after an author's death) make it almost impossible to tell based on the material itself, whether that material is copyright. I have to conclude that today's US copyright is an imposition by…

I, along with most commentators it seems, consider the shift to give rights to authors (over a private, closed, cabal of printers) in the Statute of Anne to be the shift to copyright of a form recognisable today.

The Licensing Act you refer to was a censorship law, not a copyright law; it IIRC doesn't protect authors rights nor give them primacy as the creators of [copyright] works.

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

#179

Post by user5994461 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #116
user5994461 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have a banner ad that gives then a thousandth of a penny Forget about thepiratebay. It's children pocket money. Remember the time of RapidShare/Megaupload? They were paying something like $5 per thousand downloads. Let's imagine a popular DDL/streaming site sending one video. The next week it's been downloaded 100k times. That's $500 easy money for one upload. Multiply that amount of money by the amount of mov…

But those sites you're talking about are actually distributing content illegally. They're not linking to things, or doing even less.

These sites are exclusively linking. They NEVER host anything.

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

#180

Post by unicornporn »

amelius wrote: post #73
unicornporn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_evidence It could bring you into more problems than you started with.

Yes, this was a FTL proof of concept that was meant to show how worthless screenshots are as evidence.
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