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

this is a fundamental flaw in some current law

[jacquesm]

In many countries it is now illegal to link to infringing content, it will take the likes of google to be sued before we'll get a real precedent because only they have enough money to take it all the way to the highest courts.

Linking should be ok, no matter what the content, after all, if you link to one of my sites I can replace the contents of that site after the fact by something that is copyrighted, in no way should an action by me make you liable. This will decide the future of the web.

Re:this is a fundamental flaw in some current law

[T Murphy]

If they cannot stop infringement as long as the internet as we know it exists, then enforcing laws that break the internet sounds like a great way to solve the problem. Maybe they do know what they're doing.

Do you blame the road if the car is stolen?

[decipher_saint]

A search engine isn't some magic machine that developers plug wishes and rainbows in and tell it not to be naughty (especially in the age of ever-changing legally defined naughtyness).

A search engine simply leads to data, for that to work it has to store some part of it. The reality is that a search engine is completely ignorant of morals, laws and copyright.

Data is collected. Data is stored. Data is Data.

Re:So, to draw a parallel

[EkriirkE]

Yes.
In HS I showed out net admin that I could access anyone's private doc folder - across multiple campuses. I wasn't caught, I explicitly showed it to the proper authorities. I got suspended and my computer privileges revoked.

Apparently you are better off doing wrong than good.