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Web Hosts Hit With $32 Million Judgment For Content
mikesd81 tips news that a California jury has found two web hosting companies liable for "contributing to trademark and copyright infringement" after hosting web sites that sold counterfeit Louis Vuitton items. Both companies are owned by the same man, Steven Chen, and are being ordered to pay $32 million in fines. A similar judgment for $61 million went against eBay last year for facilitating the sale of counterfeit Louis Vuitton merchandise.
"The US District Court for the Northern District of California is expected to issue a permanent injunction banning the internet service providers from hosting Web sites that selling fake Louis Vuitton goods in the future, the company said. Attorneys for the luxury goods maker said in a statement that the case is the first successful application on the internet of the theory of contributory liability for trademark infringement. Under this theory, companies that know, or should know, that they are enabling illegal activities have an obligation to remedy the situation. Entities that fail to do so, as Louis Vuitton alleged in this case, can be held legally responsible for contributing to the illegal activities."
The government has wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide powers to regulate commerce. I'm not really concerned if they mess with sites linked by money to the real world- it doesn't stop the flow of information.
So...if I sell Cisco gear, and it turns out that I wind up with counterfeit Cisco gear, they could argue that because I know what real Cisco gear looks like I should be able to identify any counterfeit Cisco gear. Then Cisco can come in and slap me for some unholy sum for "should have known". I wonder how much they lose in sales due to cheap counterfit equipment. I mean, arguably, someone buying a cheap counterfit is not likely to pay the full price for a real one, so it is pretty difficult to call all of it lost sales. So...now there is an active disincentive to protect your goods from counterfit. Instead of worrying about counterfit, they can just go sue the shit out of anyone selling counterfit to people who probably wouldn't have purchased an original anyways. Thus turning a bunch of non-sales into revenue. This is just fucking brilliant.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
This isn't the store, it's the not even the relevant "mall". It's the REIT that holds the mall.
If you are not co-located with the offending physical store presence, how are you supposed to know it's counterfeit?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
How long until we see a mass movement of hosting facilities to other states and countries? This is really scary. I don't mind the fact that hosting facilities are now liable a lot more than before, but the court just _forced_ hosting providers to become judges of who is in breach or not of copyright. No sane hosting provider will ever protect its customer from for instance the laywers of MS. Practically any content you have can, one way or the other, be twisted into a copyright infringement by a clever lawyer. You can be shut down at any time without any chance to protect yourself. Yikes!
There needs to be a new law that operates similar to the DMCA safe harbor and take-down notice system works for copyrights. If Louis Vitton thinks that someone is selling a fake Louis Vitton bag on, say, eBay, they would send eBay a take down notice alleging (under penalty of perjury) trademark/trade dress infringement. eBay then takes down the auction when notified (and in doing so is given safe harbor from any infringement connected with the auction). And just like the DMCA take-down notice system, if the take-down is baseless (i.e. no violation has taken place), the item can be re-listed (or the information can be re-posted or whatever). And just like the DMCA, when you file a counter claim, you are alleging (under penalty of perjury) that no violation has taken place.
sites get protection from being sued for allowing items/content/etc that violate someones IP to be listed/sold/posted/etc
Companies who's IP is being violated have a simple way to get infringing content/auctions/etc taken down (but only if its actually infringing)
And those who are selling legitimate items that DON'T violate someone else's IP (such as a genuine Louis Vitton bag) are free to go on selling without the risk of having their legit auction pulled.
They further said that Chen and his companies had been informed of the activity by Louis Vuitton but still refused to implement a policy for removing the offending sites, which was their responsibility.
So, I'm an ISP, and I host someone who runs a second-hand store. They sell legitimate "Louis Vuitton" crap, but at prices well below retail.
Louis Vuitton "informs" me that the material is counterfeit. I'm supposed to verify this how?
Since when did ISPs become the gatekeeper of what is and isn't legal?
Seems that now anyone who provides a service can be held liable for illegal activities from its users.
You know, it's unfeasible to keep control of user content. An automated system can only detect so much, and may block legitimate content. Having employees responsible of verifying the user content would cause delay and extra costs to the service provider. Even so, it would still be possible to ignore these measures by requiring authentication.
They would need both an advanced AI/an army of moderators and destroy all privacy to make sure no user content is infringing laws. Very unlikely to happen.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
Thus only large uber-corporations will provide ISP\Web hosting with strict controls putting the Internet solely in the hands of multinationals that can afford the risk.
Freedom takes another blow and more and more of the Internet as we knew it vanishes. Soon there will be nothing left except big business and big government on the Internet... or whatever you want to call what it has become...
I'm not big on conspiracies but all these dominos falling seem a tad too corrdinated for my tastes...
Step 1: Gain control of communications
Step 2: Commoditize communication
Step 3: Litgate liability
Step 4: Censor in the name of controlling liability
Step 5: Control the flow of information
Step 6: Persecute, I mean prosecute those who share 'dangerous and subversive' information
Hilter, Stalin, and Mao would be proud of the direction we are headed... The Internet was a great dream and a place for freedom. Now there are so few dominos left to fall before that dream lies dead...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
First Sale Doctrine says even an "unlicensed distributor" is allowed to sell an item.
Well, until a law gets passed which repeals it. Which is fairly likely to happen in the not to distant future.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Despite the belief of Slashdot, most companies don't get to the point of a $32 million dollar lawsuit without trying some fairly rigorous steps to prevent getting to that point. Nor do judges tend to make decisions about "should have known" without at least "some" evidence that this was the case. Hell no one has even tried this one against a file sharer or torrent site, and I'm sure some lawyers thought about it.
The premise for cases like this is that deliberate ignorance is not a defense. You can't do a house inspection walk through the basement and pretend that the meth lab isn't there, you know it's there and you're responsible for doing something about it.
I dont disagree but I was expressing concern as to what constituted "deliberate ignorance". Obviously the prosecution and defense will differ wildly on what rises to the level of "deliberate" and "complicit". Claiming a service provider that implicitly enables a crime *might* be a steep slippery slope. Do we go after the software vendor that supplied the shopping cart service? How about Firefox for not blocking the site? How about Visa and Mastercard for processing the payments? Comcast for not blocking the site? I hope that in this case the court found that the ISP was particularly deliberate rather than just the easiest to prosecute.
there you go:
you are hereby informed that your posts violate louis vuitton trademarks and you are not allowed to post here.
slashdot admins, please delete aepervius accounts.
or else,
louis vuitton.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of Hand Bags. . .
"A handbag, it says, is the most massively useful thing an intergalactic hitchhiker can have. [Insert witty Adams-isms about the usefulness of hand bags here.] [. . .] thus leading to The Great Counterfeit Hand Bag Crisis of the early twenty-first century. The judges, lawyers and general rif-raf of the legal profession as it happened all had wives who were partial to their expensive accessories and none too pleased to see cheap knock-offs of their own fashionable handbags being carried about by simply EVERY other woman on the street. As such, the wives exerted their collective will toward the task of making their husbands entirely miserable until something was done about this altogether offensive state of affairs. Now, as is well recognized that the collective might of any large group of truly unhappy women is approximately equal in its force upon a planetary culture as a prolonged, large-scale military engagement, it was not long before the crime of hand bag counterfeiting was elevated to the very top of the list of humanity's most heinous mis-doings, right up there with the really bad stuff, --like listening to music without a license, and forcing children to make handbags and other fashion accessories in musty sweat-shops. Indeed, handbag counterfeiting and listening to music without a license were swiftly and severely punished leading to the establishment of a planet-wide police state. And while sweat-shop labor received somewhat less attention, it was nonetheless strongly frowned upon; people would shuffle while looking at their shoes and utter things like, "Oh, yes, well that's simply terrible, that is! Simple terrible." Indeed, it was considered altogether so terrible that it was often considered wise to simply not mention it at all, particularly when attending those swank gatherings where the finest handbags were on display."
-FL
The only time I take down a site that "supposedly" is infringing on a copyright is if I have a court order forcing me to do so.
I get tons of emails, phone calls and letters from lawyers telling me I have to shut down website xyz.com because they "may" be infringing on their clients copyrights.
Kiss my ass!!! How do I know your client isn't infringing on my clients copyright???
How do I know you're not some asshat competitor trying to get the site shut down???
Point being, is that if the judge ordered them to shut down the site and they didn't then yes, they are liable. But if there is no court order enforcing this, then they can appeal and most likely overturn that case.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!