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)."

Comments

No monetary liability it seems

[SmilingBoy]

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.

Re:No monetary liability it seems

[yuhong]

Yea, DMCA takedown notices in the US do the same thing.

re:yahoo

[JohnVanVliet]

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 .

Replace their respective pages with a message

[mykos]

"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!

Re:Replace their respective pages with a message

[marcello_dl]

Everything gets done by government decree and some tens of thousand laws in excess make justice inapplicable, that's been true for decades here.

That does not mean the current government is just like the old ones. I don't buy the "politicians are stupid/insane" theory but when I read newspapers, at first I think: "Franz Kafka on acid".

Then don't link to movies. Period.

[MartinSchou]

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.

No, Even Worse

[skywire]

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.