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Another Question Of Search Engine Legality and Infringement
Another question of search engine "legality" is being addressed with a recent court case in the UK over a video search engine. Techdirt's coverage questions the long-standing tradition of how to evaluate contributory infringement claims for sites like search engines based on the highly subjective "I know it when I see it" test. "Take for example, the situation going on in the UK, where Anton Benjamin Vickerman and his wife Kelly-Anne Vickerman decided to do something that makes a lot of sense: create a search engine for videos online, indexing a variety of different sites. This was as a part of their company Scopelight, and the search engine itself was called Surfthechannel. This is certainly a useful product. But, of course, the search engine's algorithm has no way of knowing if that video has been put up by the copyright holder on purpose or if it's unauthorized. Even more tricky, how does it determine fair use? So, it did the reasonable thing: it includes everything. Lots of the videos are legal. Plenty are potentially unauthorized. Apparently that wasn't good enough for a UK-based anti-piracy group UK-FACT, who had Scopelight's premises raided, claiming the site is illegal, since people can find unauthorized content via it. Of course, you can find unauthorized content on Google as well. But you know who's liable for that? Whoever actually put it online. Not the search engine that pointed you to it."
I liked Surf the Channel back when it was small and relatively unknown. If I missed a show it was usually the only way I could find it- because sites like Hulu and the official Network sites are blocked to Canadians. So, I could watch the episode and get back to watching the series each week on TV.
Surf The Channel always made it abundantly clear all over their site that 1) they do not host any videos and 2) you are leaving their site and going to another site and STC was not liable for any 3rd party site's content.
Sadly, the 'big wigs' apparently learned about STC because slowly but surely all the content that STC linked to was being pulled down from those 3rd party sites. So obviously STC was being used by the industry to find copies of illegal videos then contacting the 3rd party site to make them take it down. For example off sites like MegaVideo.
Here's the thing. I don't have pay-tv. So, I used to be a fan of Dexter. But now that STC is gone, I will have no way of continuing to watch it. And will I buy the DVD set? Hell no.
I realize the /. crowd totally gets this and I'm preachng to the choir... but arg! This stupidity can't last forever. I already find my self reluctant to pick up any new series b/c I know that if I miss an episode or two, I'm screwed. I want to watch shows on my own schedule. W/o paying an arm and a leg for cable or satellite and DVR.