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."

Comments

Re:So, to draw a parallel

[JustinKSU]

If I show the cops were the bank robbers are stashing the money, I'm guilty of robbing the bank?

You are guilty of not being smart enough to blackmail them for a cut.

Re:So, to draw a parallel

[Hurricane78]

You should have done the following:
Install a trojan backdoor on as much systems as possible. Then frag the admins's systems trough some of those backdoors (which should be encrypted), and at least twice trough an external anonymizing proxy.

But frag them slowly, taking all the backups with you.
That will teach 'em to learn their security, for sure. ^^

Then wait for the new security update to be announced. ^^