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Dutch Portal Cleared of Copyright Infringement
CRCates writes "A Dutch court in Haarlem has cleared Techno Design, the operator of Zoekmp3.nl, a music search engine portal, of copyright infringement. The case was launched by BREIN, the Dutch entertainment industry's anti-piracy group. The court ruled that providing links to an MP3 file does not constitute disclosure or publication of contents under Dutch copyright law."
So are services that merely provide indexing and contact data for other systems legal under Dutch law?
Napster, for one? Sharereactor, etc?
May we never see th
By that logic the yellow pages is guilty of all gun crime, because they tell you where to get guns.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Sounds like Dutch webhosts are the most likely now to be the hosts for copyrighted mp3 sites, provided the mp3 files are held elsewhere. After all, if a website's having to change it's DNS every few weeks as it is booted from one host to the other, it makes sense to just host in a safe haven.
Still, downloading Mp3's via links sounds so inefficient!
You have to dig pretty deep in the law books to find that this is legal...
Actually, that is daft. It is legal because it is not in the law books at all. It's a good thing the books don't list the finite list of things that are allowed, right?
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
so will google be adding audio and video searches now that it can back itself up with a court ruling (albeit dutch)?
Actually drug figures here (The Netherlands) are lower than most other european countries and certainly lower than in the US. (Both for hard and soft drugs)
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
It's been tried. DeCSS links, Scientology and others taking slaps at Google for providing links, etc.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
By that logic the yellow pages is guilty of all gun crime, because they tell you where to get guns.
Maybe it's more like gun manufacturers, since they also put you 'one click' away from committing a crime.
I think the legal case can be made that one has a right to do this under the first amendment as well as for other reasons. For one, you could argue that you arr not really "sharing" the files. You just put them on YOUR computer for YOUR personal use. If someone happens to download them due to bad security...oh well. But besides that it really is a free speech issue. How can the government tell someone what electric pulses are allowd to come out of their computer. And finally my favorite arguement. The RIAA could always come up with a rule that would turn ANY file into a song. All they would have to do is come up with a special codec for that file to match that song. When you think about it for a song to be illegal the codec must be recognized. But then who's to say what is recognized and what is not? This is a slippery slope.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Imported from Belgium, of course.
That is correct.
I agree with it.
And till the UN gets off it's ass and does something about the slavery going on TODAY in parts of africa they have no moral standing in my book.