Dutch Court Rules Hyperlinks Can Constitute Infringement

Ubi_NL writes "In yesterday's ruling of Playboy (via publisher Sanoma) vs Dutch blog Geenstijl, the court ruled that hyperlinking to copyrighted material was itself infringement of copyright. The court ordered the blog to remove all links to the infringing links (court ruling in Dutch). How this ruling fits into the supreme court ruling that hyperlinks cannot by themselves infringe copyright is still to be discussed, possibly in an appeal."

Comments

Re:And standing next to me is stealing my air

[Znork]

Unfortunately it doesn't seem that new, there's also the judge Chris Hensen who happened to be running a commercial anti-piracy together with the council for the plaintif while deciding that links to TPB should be blocked.

Frankly I suspect it's rare with members of the various parts of the judicial system in the field of IP who do not have significant financial interest in enforcing IP. Whether it's revolving door interest or more blatant abuses the field of government granted monopolies has always been lucrative for those on the inside, which probably makes the field very attractive for those with slightly lower ideals than what could be expected in a judiciary.

Re:The specific ruling:

[1u3hr]

Wrong. As some other posters have already shown, google happily indexes and searches FileFactory.

No it doesn't. FF blocks indexing. See http://www.filefactory.com/robots.txt

Google indexes links to FF it finds on other sites. You can't just get a file listing of uploads to FF from FF (well, maybe with a court order).

Re:Security by obcurity?

[Erik Hensema]

Copyright law protects Security By Obscurity. So the judge was correct in this case.

In order in infringe on copyright law, you'll have to make a copied work public. So, as long as you don't publish a copied work (i.e. keeping it obscure), it's not an infringement. This, for instance, allows you to make a private copy of a copyrighted work without infringing on copyright law.

In this case, a private copy was made. Nobody knew where to find the copy, except for the person who placed the copy online. So, while the copy was on the internet, it wasn't public. Geenstijl made the copy public by making the URL known to the general public. Therefore Geenstijl infringed on dutch copyright law.