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Hyperlinking Is Not Copyright Infringement, EU Court Rules
Freshly Exhumed writes "Does publishing a hyperlink to freely available content amount to an illegal communication to the public and therefore a breach of creator's copyrights under European law? After examining a case referred to it by Sweden's Court of Appeal, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled today that no, it does not. The Court found that 'In the circumstances of this case, it must be observed that making available the works concerned by means of a clickable link, such as that in the main proceedings, does not lead to the works in question being communicated to a new public.'" Reader Bart Smit points to the court's ruling.
The internet before search depended on hyperlinking.
Does this mean The Pirate Bay is legit now?
Pirate Bay is now legal!
This ruling only applies to copyrighted content that is legally and publicly available. Linking to content that is behind e.g. a paywall would constitute a copyright-infringement. Similarly, it doesn't rule that linking to publicly available, but unauthorized content would be legal, that is an entirely different matter.
Why is this ruling important, then? Well, it could be used as a stepping-stone for more in-depth ruling about linking to content, like e.g. the aforementioned unauthorized content. Similarly, many journalists, newspapers and whatnot have been sued in the recent past for copyright-infringement simply for linking to an article on another newspapers' website. Some companies are even trying to extort money from Google and other search-engines for the same thing, so now they could possibly use this ruling as a defense. Search-engines aren't journalists, that's true, but a new ruling could be based on this one and grant search-engines the same rights in hyperlinking.
Search is hyperlinking..
So does this mean the torrent links will be back? On a different point, It sucks that I cannot download Linux while at the hotel, using bittorrent
Hyperlinking is not copyright infringement and pointing out a drug dealer is not facilitating drug trafficking... kind of obvious if you think about it. I suppose that there is some substance to the claim that common sense has died if it is necessary to go to court to establish simple facts like these.
So any search result that doesn't hotlink the results isn't a search?
Learn to love Alaska
(but as my wife would say.... what else is new?)
Anyways... If the content is already freely available, then the content is already available to the public, isn't it? in what way would a hyperlink constitute an illegal communication to the public when the content itself is, in fact, already public?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Common sense is finally winning some ground.
In other news, duh. No shit, Sherlock.
Didn't I read the opposite just yesterday?
SurfTheChannel guy, Anton Vickerman. That case was one of the dodgiest I've ever seen in the UK court. Including testimony given in secret and what appears to be GCHQ surveillance data made available to the court.
But if linking is not infringement then Anton did not 'Conspire to defraud', it was always a terrible court case anyway twisting law and making legal assumptions that don't hold water.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120814/08323320046/surfthechannel-owner-anton-vickerman-sentenced-to-four-years-jail-conspiracy.shtml
No, it's not similar. In this case, the plaintiff complained that someone linked to them, apparently within a iframe or something. Nobody linked to unlawful or "pirated" material. The (silly) claim was that linking to Slashdot would violate Slashdot's copy rights.
TBP llinks to unlawful material, and exists primarily for the purpose of assisting in the unlawful distribution of material. They are therefore committing "contributory infringement" - they are contributing to a direct infringement. In the instant case, there is no direct infringement for anyone to contribute to.
Checked his post history. That chicken shit's running from you apk.
Is publishing an URL (or QR or equivalent) legally the same as rendering a HTML <a href="..."> hyperlink?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
must of been a really difficult decision, long live the pirate bay!
Piratebay links to files that link to several users who might or might not have the legal right to distribute the material they are distributing. There is plenty of legal distribution there. Some countries have different laws regarding copyright you see,
..Should someone know if some material is supposed to be behing a paywall if their webserver just gives it our every time someone asks? Please. If you put in online and it's accessible it's mean tto be read. I mean, information might not want to be free, but in that case someone set it free anyways.
> Does this mean The Pirate Bay is legit now?
Private property is sancto-sanct. Intellectual property is a kind of private property. Doing anything to someone else's private property, without the owner's permission, is not legal, because it violates the sanctity of private property. The government can allow that in law, but then it must pay full, immediate and adequate compensation to the owners. No amount of handwaving or fairness mumbo-jumbo talk can work around those basic tenets of constitutional capitalism. Capitalism cannot exist without the sanctity of private property. Democracy cannot exist without capitalism, because collectivism, also known as socialism and communism, can only be maintained via dictatorship, as the human nature is genetically intolerant of forced equalization.
Therefore file sharers, music and movie pirates owe restitution to the copyright holders, who created the works of literature and media, which remains their private property. In other words, there is no right to free speech when it endangers or enroaches on someone else's lawfully obtained and possessed private property. The government can grant that right in a law, but then it must pay full, immediate and adequate compensation to the affected property owners.
Tolerating file sharing is a secret plot to eliminate the concept of sacred private property from the minds of the post-1990 born populace. If intellectual property can be taken for free and our modern society is more and more focused on the use of intellectual goods, the now growing-up generation will think phyisical property can also be taken. That leads to capitalism's collapse and collectivism will arrive with the already well-known consequences (soviet-russian gulags and chinese re-education camps with over 100 million dead). There will be brutal oppression and you won't even be able to read what literature you buy in stores, as the only allowed book will be the party's red book.
There's an interesting analysis from copyright lawyer Innocenzo Genna that suggests this may not be such good news for the Internet as it seems at first glance.
The copyright-controlled activity that was under discussion was "communicating a copyright work to the public". The court decided that hyperlinking was communicating the work to the public, but ruled that it was still permitted by way of exception, because the work has already been communicated to the same public. According to Genna, this still brings hyperlinking within the sphere of copyright law, which is dangerous for the future. It would have been much better if the court had decided that linking is not "communicating the work", but just pointing to somewhere else where the work is communicated; this would have left much less scope for more restrictive rulings in other hyperlinking cases.
The air you breathe is an accessory to the copyright infringement, since without breathing air you would not exist in a form capable of infringing copyright.
The Sun is also an accessory since without it, no life on Earth, thus no you, thus no copyright infringement either.
See how stupid this "accessory to copyright infringement" sounds?
So the french blogger who was fined 3000 euros should now have a good reason to appeal his judgement, as the documents he linked to actually was publicly available?
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
I think this is an important precedent in the US as well. A "court" opined on hyperlinking on the Internet. The Internet is not controlled by any one nation or state, therefore an International court ruled hyperlinking was legal. Therefore, websites like Watch32.com are legal unless the embedded hyperlink to the content was behind a firewall. And how would Joe Public know that anyway? Watch32 is a "public" website. Even though streaming may include downloading metadata, it is not the same as actively and knowingly downloading a pirated film torrent file then watching it. Or is it?
I believe that this ruling affects the US as well. The EU Court made this ruling while considering the WIPO Copyright Treaty. The US is a member state of WIPO. You can't support WIPO then say you won't following its rulings.
I don't see why not. I guess it's not mandatory that the search engine publishes any kind of link to the original content whatsoever. But I think they lose fair use status if they publish more than a small percentage of the original, so I'm not sure what utility such a search engine would have.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Sure. I understand portals and hyperlinks as Yellow Pages irl. Nobody is going to sue Yellow Pages or other newspapers because they published an address of some fraudulent business or shop with "original" goods.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
It's PIRATE bay, not PromoteYourFreeSoftwareBay.
It's for pirating (aka unlawfully taking my work while telling my baby to go fuck herself, she doesn't need to eat because you're a selfish dick who chose to trade in your integrity rather than fork over the $25 for my work that you want to have so badly.
I do not confuse copyright. I literally think it's used to control information, give people ability to censor and take information down, and make it hard to get by either not selling it or by requiring payment first.
An example of copyright being used for censorship is the What You Play videos on YouTube. People made recordings of videogames, usually their own gameplay, because who doesn't like to keep videos and show the world what it's like when they play it? OR some people made reviews and/or put it together in a "podcast"/online little show they did. But copyright came into play, and despite that this may in fact be a fair use at least, YouTube was taking down gobs and gobs of videos, and even I myself got a threatening copyright notice for a video I recorded of myself playing "Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing".
Purely retarded shit, and some people say the copyright infringement notices were sent out because the videos may have even showed the game in poor light and made people not want to buy it, like a bad review. But who gives a fuck because that's the way the ball rolls, even if it were true.
The deal is, I sort of think all information should be free, and copyright should be extremely limited, maybe to the original product only and only for 10 years. I believe in content archival, people not owning information (even a book or video or software is knowledge and information). I believe all content if it exists should be open and available for people to experience, without stupid laws that prevent it (which is what copyright is). It also conflicts with personal liberty, because it gives the copyright holder the right to tell the individual what they can and cannot do .. which I am totally against.