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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!
To be fair, the pirate sites are the relevant results. Who looks for a movie's "official" website?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"Implying" people actually use Yahoo! search
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
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.
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) --
but your tomatoes are SO FUCKING GOOD
No, it's called a "torrent".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Ok, thanks and bye are all British English.
Also, Shakespeare had trouble spelling his own name and so while arguably a literary genius should perhaps not be held up as an example of a linguistic one.
Hope that helps.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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