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."

Comments

But they didnt ask you

[nurb432]

They decided that according to the LAW it is totally legal. A judge decided this. It has nothing to do with your twisted opinion.

As it should be. If you start declaring that links to *other* places are illegal, watch the very fabric of the net collapse.

You must think beyond the debate about a simple music file link, and towards the larger picture.

Re:But they didnt ask you

[Sique]

This is the most misunderstood ruling concerning links in the whole of Germany's juridical history.
The Hamburg ruling effectively said: A general disclaimer doesn't get you out of prison. And what do all those webmasters? They put a general disclaimer in their website, citing the ruling and say: It has to be, otherwise we will be in prison.
Doesn't anyone ever bothered to read the ruling at all?
The Hamburg ruling was against a webmaster who tried to argue that the link he was putting on his website was legal because of the disclaimer in which he stated that he refused responsibility for all links he was providing. And the court said: If you want to distance yourself from the contents a link may provide, you have to do so either specifically in the context of each link, or you have to explain why you can't take responsibility for certain links.
Look at it like this: If someone asks you were he could get cheap car electronics, and you say: Don't make me responsible, but I would try the flea market over there, they sell electronics "dropped from the truck", you are supporting crime, even though you put the general disclaimer in front.
If you say: Stay away from the flea market, they may be cheap, but I doubt the legality of their offerings, then you make clear, what you think about those offerings. This would have been a valid disclaimer.
Be very, very careful with the general disclaimer. One of the linked sites may sue you for libel, because if you distance yourself from them without valid cause, you are just badmouthing them.
And puhlease! Before you are going to put one of those cut&paste disclaimers citing the Hamburg ruling on your website, either read the ruling yourself or ask someone with some law background about the consequences. Those disclaimers don't help you. That's what the ruling, you are quoting, says. The justice will just shake his head and ask you: Why do you quote the ruling and in the same step do exactly the thing the ruling was damning?!

Re:Good news for Google!

[0x0d0a]

If he moves Google from the US to the Netherlands, yes.

Actually, basing Internet companies in the Netherlands seems to make an awful lot of sense. It's a first-world country, they have relatively permissive laws, and a dense population. Since you're right in the middle of Europe, bandwidth isn't expensive. If you can operate your company anywhere in the world (as is quite possible for a .com), it would seem like countries will start needing to compete for companies.

Not sure how nasty business taxes are, and there's obviously a host of other variables involved, but...

Does this effect ED2K Links as well?

[Jonah Hex]

A couple of well known eDonkey/eMule links sites have gone down recently for legal reasons, including sharereactor.com and jigle.com; plus the-realworld.de going down with sharereactor but popping back up later on another server. Since providing a link to a file hash is much less direct than providing a link to the file itself, how does this decision effect these types of sites, if at all?

Jonah Hex

Re:An important distinction.

[Lochin Rabbar]

Likewise, the dutch interpretation has decided that ftp site indexing or whatever the site does is currently on the "ok" side of the tipping point. however, contentholders may come back after some period of time and try to make a case that "you know, things have really changed--this has led to significant erosion of our copyrights and we ask the court again to consider this as de facto infringement because we have x, y, and z evidence collected in the interim now" and the court may re-examine it.

No the judge ruled that such acts are not covered by copyright laws because they do not involve copying. It's got nothing to do with fair use.