Slashdot Mirror
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."
The court considered if the publishing of the hyperlinks by GeenStijl.nl constituted a publication (Dutch: ‘openbaarmaking’) as defined in article 12 of the Dutch Copyright Act. In principle, placing a hyperlink on a website is not a publication, unless three criteria are met: there must be an intervention, a new audience and profit.
- Intervention: The leaked pictures of Britt Dekker were stored on FileFactory.com, a cloud service to store files and share them with others. However, these files can’t be found through search engines, only users with the exact URL have access to the files. The URL to the file with the leaked pictures was publicly unknown, until GeenStijl.nl made it available to its large audience by publishing an article about it, the court says. Therefore, the actions of GeenStijl.nl are an intervention, according to the court. Without this intervention, the public wouldn’t have had access to the pictures before their official publication in Playboy.
- New audience: According to the court, there wasn’t an audience for the pictures before GeenStijl.nl published its article.
- Profit: By publishing the URL to the pictures, GeenStijl.nl had the unmistakable intention to attract more visitors, the court states. With success: in 2011, the article about Dekker was the best viewed topic on GeenStijl.nl, according to the statistics.
Taking the three criteria and the circumstances of this specific case into account, the court concludes that GeenStijl.nl has infringed on Sanomas copyrights by publishing the URL to the leaked nude pictures of Britt Dekker.
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.
the cookie deal is european wide legislation. each nation is free to implement it with their own law provided it at least satisfies the requirements in the european law.
Your naivete is endearing, or at least it would be if there wasn't so much needless BS for people to suffer.
You may disagree - but yes, the system is inherently corrupt, designed to have everyone clawing their way over each other to the top of the heap. Nothing 'conspiratorial', just normal, everyday nature at work. All other systems work precisely the same way. It is universal. It is also a scientifically proven fact that authority WILL be abused. Please, don't try to tell us it is not being so abused in this case, like so many others. That would be absurd. Your society feels that this level of abuse is acceptable. But that doesn't make it any less abusive. If this were 1820, would you be arguing for the property rights of the slave owner? Would you not condemn people if you witness them abusing an animal?
This little 'IP' business must be turned away completely. You seem to believe it's helpful to society, but it's only because it's convenient for you to believe propaganda at this point, for whatever reason.
You teach 'ethics' through guidance and example, not by dictate and prohibition. And you can foment nothing but disrespect when you don't apply the rules evenly, just like a coat of paint.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”