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Yahoo! Liable In Italy For Searchable Content

Posted by Soulskill on from the how-does-internet-work dept.

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)."

4 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. re:yahoo by JohnVanVliet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. Replace their respective pages with a message by mykos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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!

    1. Re:Replace their respective pages with a message by xnpu · · Score: 5, Informative

      Please note that Baidu is mostly owned and operated by Goldman Sachs, not by the Chinese government. Also the majority of it's board members are US citizens.

      There is a government sponsored search engine, but the fact that you don't even know it's name says enough.

  3. Then don't link to movies. Period. by MartinSchou · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.