Web Browsing Isn't Copyright Infringement, Rules EU Court of Justice

mpicpp (3454017) writes with this news from Ars Technica: 'Europeans may browse the Internet without fear of infringing copyrights, as the EU Court of Justice ruled Thursday in a decision that ends a four-year legal battle threatening the open Internet. It was the European top court's second wide-ranging cyber ruling in less than a month. The court ruled May 13 that Europeans had a so-called "right to be forgotten" requiring Google to delete "inadequate" and "irrelevant" data upon requests from the public. That decision is spurring thousands of removal requests. In this week's case, the court slapped down the Newspaper Licensing Agency's (NLA) claim that the technological underpinnings of Web surfing amounted to infringement. The court ruled that "on-screen copies and the cached copies made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website satisfy the conditions" of infringement exemptions spelled out in the EU Copyright Directive. The NLA's opponent in the case was the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). The PR group hailed the decision.'

Comments

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the newspapers want it to be illegal to view their websites?

Re:WTF?

[internerdj]

Because if they can make it illegal to view their content on a computer they can go back to the more controllable form of print media.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't. Or they didn't seem to think that's what they were doing.

They wanted to be able to get higher revenues from certain client companies who pay licensing fees for the right to RE-produce the newspapers' contents on their own web sites, and/or who distribute it to secondary companies.

As I glean it, those fees are based on the number of end-user copies that are being made. The newspapers wanted to count ... uh, hang on now, this is getting fuzzy. I guess they wanted to count the copies that existed in end-user browser caches as ADDITIONAL copies, so that the bottom line revenues would be higher. Or something. "Its main argument was the cost that the licensing public relations companies pay for the reproductions should factor in to what is temporarily copied on a reader's computer."

Like I charge you per-copy for reading my paper, and I count the ink that rubs off on your hand as a copy. Also the reflection in your glasses.

I don't get that it would prevent anyone from reading stuff from their website, because publishing the material would constitute a license to use it, browser cache included. It's strictly a grab for more revenues for this particular redistribution channel.

Because, you know, revenue.

Re:WTF?

[jc42]

Like I charge you per-copy for reading my paper, and I count the ink that rubs off on your hand as a copy. Also the reflection in your glasses.

And there's also the copy from short-term to long-term memory that occurs in your brain when you read an article and actually remember it the next day. Soon they'll be quizzing readers about last-weeks news, and every correct answer means they can charge for the extra copy in your long-term memory.

Lest you think this is a joke, remember that companies did try to claim that computer backups are legally "copies" that must be paid for to be legal.

Re:WTF?

[gweihir]

Because they are fundamentally stupid. They think that everybody needs to view their sites (i.e. that they have a needed, irreplaceable good), so controlling all access gives them maximum impact. What actually happens is that they are a luxury good and people just stop caring about their product when it gets hard to access. Kind of like the music industry classifying each illegal download as a "lost sale", when the reality is that people just would do without if copying it was difficult. Many younger artists understand that now and are putting samples or their full works on the web, because the only way to make somebody pay for content is if they are willing to pay for content. And for the customers willing to pay, putting everything up for free and asking for donations works just as well and without all the stupidity that DRM and copyright restrictions for non-commercial copying brings with it.

The newspapers really are are primarily responsible for their own decline.

Re:WTF?

[pepty]

It would give them twin business models: subscriptions for the people willing to pay, infringement shakedowns for the people who aren't willing to pay.

What I'd like to know is if:

The court ruled that "on-screen copies and the cached copies made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website satisfy the conditions" of infringement exemptions spelled out in the EU Copyright Directive.

applies to streaming video websites as well.

Re:how does one even contact google to be forgotte

[Anonymous Coward]

GO here:

https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch

Copyright ending

[gurps_npc]

What we really need is some way to prevent congress from constantly extending copyright, slowly stealing from the public public works.

Re:Copyright ending

[lawnboy5-O]

...or of course, just get rid of congress once and for all and elect working class people who know better from the get-go. It comes down to getting the money out of politics. It's time. Cheers!

Their arguments are illogical

[mpicpp]

To argue that cache files in a web browser is infringement is as silly as claiming that your eye transmitting an image to your brain is infringement...

Re:Their arguments are illogical

[dinfinity]

You're right. Clearly we need Brain-HDCP! It would solve everything!
Kind regards, the MPAA.

P.S. HNCP would be more apt, I guess.

Re:Their arguments are illogical

[toejam13]

The stupid thing is that they can block caching of files using HTTP headers...

Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: 0

Re:Their arguments are illogical

[vux984]

Copyright law is mostly there. It specifically allows for incidental copies made to use software for example. So you don't need a separate license to move it from the CD to the hard drive, from the hard drive to the drive controller cash, to RAM, to L1 cache, to L2 cache, and to video memory, along with the copy that gets shunted to the backup tape system at night....

That all media should be extended the same incidental copyright exclusion should be a nobrainer, but yeah, until its settled we get idiots thinking the image on screen is infringement, the image in your browser cache is infringement, and by golly, and if ~thats~ not infringement, then its surely infringment when you do a complete PC back up that night and your browser cache ends up duplicated onto your external USB drive along with everything else. You dirty criminal.

Good on the EU court for setting a precedent.

Re:I don't get it

[jc42]

Someone wanted to deliver content via webserver and then sue people who received this delivery as violating copyright?

Amazing.

They seem to be saying that, in addition to displaying the content on your screen, your browser also writes a copy into its cache, and that's two copies.

I wonder what they'd say of, say, a RAID1 file system, which makes two copies of the cached page, on two different disks. Would that mean two violations of the copyright? And if, after sending it from the screen to your eyes, the information in your brain is a third violation?