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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?
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 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'
Didn't I read the opposite just yesterday?
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
Where your'e wrong is two places:
1. All these concepts you speak of (private property, democracy) are just aspirations which are only effective if they can be enforced by direct force or by established and successfully maintained social structure and mechanisms of social pressure to conform to rules and norms. There is no "God-given" anything (such as "right to private property), because it is a given that there is no God (except, again, as a socially constructed collectively maintained concept: a meme if you will). So your word "sacrosanct" here, again, is just a wish, or a word used to invoke fear that there will be social consequences for violating it.
2. There is no fundamentally important dichotomy between the private and the collective, so long as the collective is acting to some degree as a super-organism, which most if not all collectives with surprising longevity must be doing. Again, individuals versus organized groups of individuals are more alike (in how they interact with their own parts and with their environment) than they are fundamentally different.
What we have is a continuum of self-interested environment-sensing and acting agents, from our individual cells and organs, to us as "individual" humans, through tightknit resource-sharing, inter-supportive family groups, to corporations and associations, to various levels of governed groups like cities, states, nations, and federations. All can "claim to have and act as if they have" private property:
- cell 1 to cell 2: this is my blood sugar, I'm taking it inside, you can't have it
- person1 to person 2 or to nation 3: This is my house and possessions with walls and doors and you can't have it or live in it:
oh and this is my gun and I'm gripping it tightly and pointing it at you and you can't have it, or the other stuff I mentioned.
- nation 1 to nation 2: this is my fertile valley near an ocean port. I'm invading it and building a wall and an army around it, and you can't have it.
- nation 1 to person 2: Get over yourself. If I want your stuff I will incarcerate you or eliminate you, and take your stuff.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.