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Yahoo! Liable In Italy For Searchable Content
h3rr d0kt0r writes "A recent decision of an Italian court could spark considerable discussion over the liability of a search engines. The court actually ordered Yahoo! to remove any link to any site containing unlawful copies of a movie. Under EU Directives 2003/31, liability of search engines is not regulated (save for caching activities). In the case brought to court regarding the film About Elly, it was not the caching activities of Yahoo! that were questioned (or any content hosted on Yahoo!'s servers), but the mere fact that searching for the film made it possible to reach websites allowing the streaming or downloading of the movie (actually, illegal sites got a better ranking then the official one)."
From the article it seems that Yahoo was not ordered to pay anything; "only" to remove a link. This is important as this means that there is no general threat of damage payments for linking due to this court order.
I am beginning to think that Yahoo and Google
need to take a week off .
go on holiday for 7 days and watch a the world comes to a stop
then see what the court has to say .
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
Bing! will come to save the day
This is strange, when Berlusconi arrives incognito in Milan and asks a taxi driver to bring him to the whorehouse with the youngest employees, is the taxidriver then responsible for what happens next?
"Dear Customer of Yahoo/Google/Bing,
Recently, it has come to our attention that a group of copyright holders with a lot of sway in your legal system have managed to convince your government to force us to hand-pick every link we index. Unfortunately, this is not a viable solution. As such, we are no longer providing search services to your country. Good luck!
Hope to hear from you again soon if your government changes its mind!
First it's a terrible search engine, then it's out of touch, now this.
Though at least from it's name, it's upbeat.
Yahoo! should ban any italian IP, saying that the cost of doing business in Italy is too great.
the public outcry will overturn the decision immediately.
new sig
Please proofread your article submissions before posting them for thousands of people to see. It's really irritating to see basic mistakes because you are too lazy to do simple proofreading.
Just pull up every single title for every single movie, tv-show etc. on IMDB and have your search engine return
"We're terribly sorry, but since you've searched for the title of a movie, and we can't know if a link is legal or not, we have chosen not to be sued by the creators of $title and won't show any results.
If you wish to know more about why you can't find any information about movies online, please call PFA at $phone number for further information."
And since your search engine isn't a paid service, it'd be hard to argue in court that it should return results that the copyright holders decide.
Let's see how the fuckers manage to get along and drum up publicity, if their crap can't be found online at all.
Our politics has been busy fixing Berlusconi's troubles with justice for more than one decade. main The strategy is to make our judicial system a joke. What would you expect from that?
Not that I am not sad for my country, but it is only expected that our fucked up system will backfire at some point.
Yahoo! Take that!
Hope both you and media-fascist italy burn in
Hello operator!
Please give me number nine.
If this goes through, and even worse goes international, what a mess this will cause. Staff needing to peruse all new links? Massive revamping of crawler routines? Gah.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
"(actually, illegal sites got a better ranking then the official one)"
then the offical one... what?
Oh, you mean "than"... I see what you are trying to say, but it took extra effort because I went to school - silly me!.
I agree with the fact that, in these cases, search engines could just stop providing some service in that specific Country. In countries with a democracy, such as Italy (well, ok, more or less...), hopefully the people will uprise and have their representatives to something about it.
Still, the problem is more general than that, and I would like to raise the point just for the sake of discussion. Consider pedo-pornography, which is a crime in Italy as it is in many other countries as far as I know. In that case, we all agree that search engine should do their best to avoid promoting links with pedo-pornographic material, since we all agree that it is a bad thing and we don't want them to be facilitators of the crime. But downloading copyrighted material without the consent of the copyright holder is a crime too, so isn't it reasonable that search engines should behave similarly, and do whatever they can to avoid helping those who are trying to break the law?
I think that, in the end, it is all a matter of subjective perception of the involved crime. Since many of us don't see downloading copyrighted material as a crime, we expect things to be handled differently in that case. But from the point of view of law enforcement, publishing a link to a movie for illegal download is no different than pointing users to readily available pedo-pornographic material, as in both cases the search engine is an accomplice in unlawful act.
Isn't this something that we should consider, or we accept that, as far as information retrieval is involved, we want the "law of the demand" to be the strongest, and we accept that our search engines retrieve anything that we ask for? In this case, I think that we need some laws to shift the responsibility of searching and retrieving on the end user, and only consider the search engine as a medium with no responsibility whatsoever.
without google, bing's results will just return gibberish.
Search engines are now required to remove links to any and all illegal items, ideas or concepts. No bomb recipes. No lock picking manuals. No gay-support (homosexuality is illegal in dozens of countries), no free speech (outlawed in many countries)... Oh wait, it's only items owned by Big Corporations (tm) that gets this treatment. All other illegalities are still welcome on the search engines... Go figure.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
This comment made my day.
--You'd never know who...
Summary wrong, the directive in question is 2000/31, not 2003/31, the latter deals with controlled chemicals.
If you can read English then please replace then with than in the last sentence. Ok thanks bye
That, I'm afraid, is called blackmail. It is a punishable offence in many a country. Especially doing it to a court...
Oh, yeah. All ten of the Italian Yahoo users will be protesting in the streets, undertipping and reducing their political contributions. Big impact. HUGE.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
We're all in the same boat, friend.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So, how would this work? If I own the copyright to a movie and I know that site X is distributing an illegal copy, then I go tell yahoo to remove the link? Sounds reasonable, except for the implication that since they can't legally fight the site itself, they go to the Search engine instead, which means that the site owner never gets a chance to defend himself.
Man, it sucks to be an ISP or Search Engine these days.
I have been waiting for a bit "normal" search site to get sued (okej, they haven't here but almost the same) so that we can see how absurd that torrent search sites get sued.
Yes, there are a bit that differ from Isohunt/Piratebay and Google/Yahoo/Bing but not much. In Google I can search for torrent files and find the same pirated content.
But the main difference is that the big search sites have money for good lawyers while torrent sites don't.
Oh, and Google actually host "pirated" media (books, pictures and so on) while none of the torrent sites does.
So for me it is as it always have been. Large corporations can do what the fuck they want while ordinary people can't do even close to the same thing.
If you don't want the search engines indexing your life, just link to something infringing!!!
surely the lessons should have been learnt after the events of recent months. granted the control of the internet has not been a main factor but it is still part. if you start controling what resources are available to people your as good as digitally shackling them.
Internet freedom and freedom of expression are key elements of modern society. controlling what we see on the internet is like filtering the world, gaddaffi has tried to do it to his people using the the media. where does it stop?
This from the country where the president (Prime Minister to be exact) engages in sex with underage prostitute(s).
No surprise.
somebody's got to pay to stop that
cnn gets the twit of the day/can't stop the spirit nod, again;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDVt_hSo_EU&feature=player_embedded
spies like us? cool?
If the court says anything it is likely to be along the lines of not being held to ransom by corporate pressure.
If you want a law changed, you have to convince the lawmakers - i.e. the politicians.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The real question is "How does Yahoo know which links to delete?". The answer is "Those which haven't proven a legal right". Meaning, the onus should be upon the distributor to prove his site is legal. Yahoo should demand a signed statement from the producer of the movie and a large (per movie) administration fee before indexing a distributor's web site.
If Italy really pushes hard on this, I hope all the major search engines decide to block requests from IP blocks assigned to Italy. That would likely take less time than trying to figure out which links are legitimate and which aren't.
After Italy's government ministers and other officials find that they can't search for their [preferred vice or hobby] any longer, they might be forced to contend with the stupid rules that result from this decision.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
The judge did not order Yahoo to "remove a link". The judge ordered, whether with or without understanding of the outrageous meaning and far-reaching consequences of his or her action, that Yahoo somehow modify their search engine such that it will simply not do what a search engine properly does. And don't imagine for a moment that the judge's order does not come with the threat of punitive action such as monetary sanction, confiscation of property, or arrest.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Blackmail is extorting payment by use of threats. Telling someone you will not index their web pages unless they stop threatening you with lawsuits is not blackmail.
I don't care why you're posting AC
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=Ah_DPavy4Za9jFbCJYEqaLCbvZx4?p=then+vs+than&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-375
There, fixed that for you.
actually, illegal sites got a better ranking then the official one
It is my opinion that then/than are probably two of the most misused words in the English language. Then, an adverb meaning at a time. Back then I used to not care. Than, a conjunction used as after comparative adjectives and adverbs, to introduce the second member of an unequal comparison or as a preposition to show relation to or comparison with (usually followed by a pronoun).
...actually, illegal sites got a better ranking than the official one...
The correct statement would there be:
Oh, wait. This is a geek site, sorry, my bad.
Remove Yahoo from Italy at once!