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Linking Without Permission Violates Copyright, Rules EU Court (reuters.com)
BarbaraHudson writes: Reuters is reporting that Playboy has won a lawsuit against a Netherlands news site for linking to photos without permission: "'It is undisputed that GS Media (which owns GreenStijl) provided the hyperlinks to the files containing the photos for profit and that Sanoma had not authorized the publication of those photos on the internet,' the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) said in a statement. 'When hyperlinks are posted for profit, it may be expected that the person who posted such a link should carry out the checks necessary to ensure that the work concerned is not illegally published.' The European Commission, the EU executive, is set next week to propose tougher rules on publishing copyrighted content, including a new exclusive right for news publishers to ask search engines like Google to pay to show snippets of their articles."
Neil_Brown adds: The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled today on whether posting, on a website, hyperlinks to copyright infringing works constitutes a "communication to the public" for the purposes of EU copyright law, an act which requires permission of the rights holder or other authorizing basis. The court held that, if the links are provided "without the pursuit of financial gain by a person who did not know or could not reasonably have known the illegal nature of the publication of those works on that other website," the act of posting the hyperlink is not an infringement of copyright. However, if the links are providing in the pursuit of financial gain, the poster of such links is deemed to have known that they were infringing copyright, unless they can prove otherwise. The court has stated that those sites operating "for profit" are expected to have carried out the (impossible?) "necessary checks to ensure that the work concerned is not illegally published on the website to which those hyperlinks lead." The court does not clarify what is meant by "the pursuit of financial gain." If previous decisions are followed, any sites which host ads (Papasavvas), or perhaps even just accrue value to a brand (if the Advocate General's opinion in McFadden is followed), might be treated as operating for financial gain.
Farewell. We hardly knew ye.
This year has been record-breaking for localised and global stupidity, but I think we have a winnar.
I guess other countries have to come to their own conclusions, but at least in the US this has been settled. If you don't want something available publicly, put authentication on it. This isn't hard guys.
You're linking to a party that is legally hosting the content, how is that infringement?
Remember all those site T&Cs that explicitly lay out how you grant the company who owns the website you're hosting your content on exclusive worldwide copyright licenses?
Unless everything on the internet now comes with an "exclusive worldwide copyright license" search engines are officially extinct.
ok, so one party puts the pictures onto a public http server, then claims they did not want those pictures publicly available--- and the courts accepted this logic?
there are other ways besides putting them on a public http server, for those images to be shared with purchasing clients and other select audiences.
so, linking to files on a public http server is copyright infringement, if the copyright holder made them available, but is really an idiot and did not mean to?
because that is what i am taking away from this.
Aw, hell no!
So does that mean speaking, writing or otherwise commenting on a copyrighted subject is now a violation of copyright.
It's the same thing.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Perhaps the remote server should have the proper headers in order for a cross-domain image linking to work...
How is that liberal bastion of Europe treating you now?
News headline from the future:
[Online News Corporation] sued in EU court for providing basic descriptions of [Media Company]'s content.
This decision is so short-sighted and idiotic, I cannot understand how you could make it. Under this rule, /. itself is now in violation in the EU. EVERYTHING is covered by copyright and almost no one gets permission in advance for linking content.
Of course, the EU could be playing the long game in terms of killing ads on the internet for good, as they are the primary source of financial gain.
by stupid people.
Anyone still asking why european people hates europeen union ?
Facebook challenged in 3...2....1....
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
are now completely f****'ed....
Surprise surprise: a court said something stupid.
Back in the days that FTP was the common way to exchange data over the internet, there were two ways you could do it. There was anonymous FTP, that anyone could access. That made your data public. If you didn't want public references to your data, you could also put it behind a password protected FTP server. It was your choice! Use the one that suits your wishes. Both were available, and you got to pick.
That is a foundation principle of the internet. It's the way luminaries from Jon Postel to Tim Berners-Lee thought it should work. If you don't want public links to your stuff, the web gives you that choice. It doesn't require new laws. You just have to use the facilities that are there.
I'd really like to know how many RFCs this judge's name is on... bet I can guess the answer.
This ruling directly contradicts Tim Berners-Lee's express design plans for The Web. In 1997, Berners-Lee stated that
He even wrote this sentence in bold, inside a box, accompanying his Axioms of Web Architecture.
Don't host or own internet company in the EU
love is just extroverted narcissism
The problem was that they knowingly linked to copyright infringing material, and they linked to it from a for-profit site. If they had asked the site they linked to for permission, it wouldn't have changed the outcome at all.
Good thing the UK is leaving the EU.
News Publishers need to seriously limit what google can do to their websites if they don't want things to be shown.
Didn't they also say that unprotected Wi-Fi invites connections? You need to add authentication/encryption to connections for security. Should the linking ruling not then say that you need authentication for all content that you do not want linked? If there is no protection, you then invite said linking?
You're blurring the line between content and pointers to said content.
COPYright applies to copying the content. Linking to it is free speech.
Linking to content in the context of the copyright holder (their web page) is free speech, plus some recognize fair uses of excerpts. But taking excerpts is not unlimited and that is what linking is. Taking a fraction of copyright material out of the owner's context and placing it into your context. Note that in traditional publication one must quote and provide a visible references to the source. A link fails to provide such a visible reference and the content provided by the link is not quoted or otherwise identified as coming from somewhere else. It appears inline to your content and erroneously appears to be your content. That is plagiarism not free speech.
Does the court even say? I mean, are you supposed to email the sysadmin and ask do you own copyright or have approval to use it? And if they say "yes" (let's say, thru automated bot response), is that sufficient? What else is one supposed to do? There isn't a unified copyright management authority, copyright is supposed to be implemented by owners bringing infringers to court. So how is a 3rd party supposed to know whether a given party is legally licencing/owning the copyright? I mean, wouldn't it be plausible for their licenced usage to be under NDA i.e. a secret agreement? How then could you ascertain legality if the coyright owner doesn't want to admit licencing it to that party? Further, I don't see the difference here in images vs. text, both are subject to copyright protection... Which would mean "if you are operating for profit", that EVERY outlink would need to follow this court-mandated procedure, and verify copyright whether for text or images. In other words, the entire WWW has been a massive criminal enterprise from the very start. Do these judges verify copyright when favoriting/linking to other people's facebooks, blogs, etc?
In traditional documents if you wish to display a partial excerpt of someone else's work you quote it to make it clear it is not your work and you provide a public reference to the original. Fair use generally permits excerpts in such situations. Embedding content into your page fails on both parts. In is akin to traditional plagiarism, where you fail to identify an excerpt as being someone else's work and fail to publicly inform the reader where to find the original.
So does that mean speaking, writing or otherwise commenting on a copyrighted subject is now a violation of copyright. It's the same thing.
No, in both writing and speaking we have fair use conventions for quoting the excerpt and citing the original source. Failing to do so is known as plagiarism, displaying someone else's work within your work without proper attribution. These fair use conventions can be applied to the web. Silently linking and embedding is pretty much the same thing as plagiarism.
I'm genuinely curious:
Is there anyone here who believes that this is not a completely stupid ruling?
If so, please explain to the rest of us how pointing to something that is already publicly available (ie published on a web page) could possibly be a violation of copyright.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Linking Without Permission Violates Copyright, Rules EU Court
Eh, not quite, as far as I can tell. Linking to files which already violate copyright themselves has now been ruled to be copyright violation.
Linking to a BBC news article or a legitimately copyrighted and published YouTube video aren't going to be considered copyright violations.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It is official; Surveys now confirm: The EU is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered EU when Apple CEO Tim Cook described the power grabbing supranational's investigation of its Irish tax affairs as "political bullshit". Coming close on the heels of the EU centralized tax identification number, their attempt to subsume the taxation rights of sovereign states is now clear for all to see. The EU is collapsing in complete disarray, as dead in the water as one of Merkel's drowned migrants.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the EU's future. The writing is on the wall: The EU faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the EU because the EU is dying. Things are looking very bad for the EU. As many of us are aware, the currency is becoming worthless. Negative interest rates are a tax on capital.
Let's stick to the facts and look at the numbers.
Germany has admitted over 1 million migrants, 80% are unfit for anything other than menial work. Integration, housing and welfare costs will out-weigh their net economic contribution. Sex attacks committed by migrants have reached pandemic proportions across the entire continent. Tourism numbers in France and Germany have dwindled due to terrorism. Greece is bankrupt and unable to escape the crushing debt burden imposed by its membership in the eurozone. Italian banks are insolvent. Deutsche Bank, one of Germany's largest banks has an estimated derivatives exposure equal to global GDP. The pension liabilities of the various EU institutions total over â63 billion.
All major surveys show that the EU has lost the confidence of Europe's peoples. The EU is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the EU is to survive at all it will be as a third world hellhole. The EU continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save the EU from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the EU is dead.
Fact: The EU is dying
It would seem copy has more rights than people.
Britons have already brexited that bureaucratic shithole. Other countries are on their tale. This sort of idiot decision by arrogant EU "judges" (EU law? HAW HAW HAW!) and unelected bureaucrats will only hasten their departure.
Dafuq?
Do you know what the word link means?
It's the actual thingy you click.
They just made that illegal.
Back in the early 2000's, Tribalwar.com, another gamer cesspool of the internet, had a picture posted on the site linked by CNN.com on their front page.
Middle of the day, tribalwar was completly unavailable because their server was overloaded from all the traffic. As in the picture on CNN's front page was loaded directly from their servers.
The forum admin called and called and e-mailed asking them to please stop. This complaining all fell on deaf ears.
So, he switched out the picture with goatse (for those of you not in the know, it's a picture of a guy holding his butthole open).
Several million people saw Goatse in all it's glory, right there on CNN's front page as their feature article, over the course of the next several hours.
Then, like magic, the issue was fixed.
We had a by far better way of settling these things in the old days.
I would link to the appropriate XKCD comic, but I don't want to have to prove I'm not violating copyright.
Goodbye, EU.
Delinked.
EUexit.
Executed.
404
If you don't like this ruling you need to wake up and take responsibility for the shitty situation we're all in. The only way we have a chance at hell in overturning copy"right" law is forming new states of people who object to the idea of using violence to achieve political aims. Copy"right" is an artificial concept that depends on the state's use of violence to enforce. Those who don't respect the concept get violated by the state and by those who do support the construct.
If you think we should get rid of such ridicules laws where there is no violence involved come join me in New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project. The Free State Project is a migration effort to get those who object to the idea that other people have a right to control you for their or others end. We should all be free to do as we like so long as it does not involve violence against others and we respect each others property. You should not need to ask the state for permission to drive a car, pay a vehicular registration tax, or surrender to papers please (or put other identification like a license plate on your car).
Taxes are just another form of theft by the state to achieve a political aim. At one time we had something called charity and violence was not required to get people to donate. I wish to revert back to these concepts and live without the constant threat of violence against my life. Won't you migrate with me to New Hampshire? We can get rid of most bad laws by joining together in one place and free the majority of people who are incarcerated that have committed no violence against another. We're already a good way to this objective with 10% of 20,000 people whom have agreed to migrate having actually migrated. People who signed up agreed to migrate within 5 years and we reached 20,000 only this past March. We need more people to have a realistic chance of forming an independent state, but we're off to a good start. Nowhere in NH can you move that you won't bump into "Free Staters" (people who migrated overy the pursuit of liberty).
www.freestateproject.org www.freekeene.com www.freetalklive.com
Linking Without Permission
Linking without permission... Linking without permission? Linking without what? This phrase doesn't even make sense.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Have gnu, will travel.
That made me laugh: 'Greenstijl' is actually Geenstijl ('No Style') and is definitely not green nor left, but a right wing conservative news site favored by white non-college degree males, focused on 'shocknews' for commercial gain. They love Trump.
an observation:
Cross-site embedded images are a problematic capability. If there were some sort of meta tag by which a server could inform a browser that its images are not to be cross-linked, then we could have the best of both worlds.
That analogy might work if they were hotlinking Playboy. They weren't. Instead, they were using unlawfully copied images hosted on some server which they may not own.
Some people (possibly the defendants, possibly not) were illegally uploading the images to imageshare.com or whatever and the defendants built a porn site using the Playboy images from imageshare.com.
I want them to really do it so the world will understand all the entire world has become a giant 3 year old that lacks understanding of anything at all.
Don't like Google finding your site? THEN SHUT OFF THE ROBOT THAT LETS GOOGLE FIND YOUR SITE!!!!! But go ahead, sue for damages, and you can bank the little bit of cash that you made, that Google will never ever find your site again, and in a very short time, no one else will either. Have fun with that.
Thought it said "Thinking without permission"
Yes, but I actually read the whole ruling (first link of second part of TFS). It's densely written and hard to parse, with a lot of run-on sentences and unclear phrasing. Plus there's plenty of spin added, by taking the selected quotes out-of-context, so the unified negative reaction is not surprising.
The ruling takes a lot of things into consideration, but first key here is the idea of introducing material to a "new public" by linking to it. Forget copyright for a moment. YouTube and others (for example) have a concept of making material available, but only if you have the exact link. There's no authorization involved, beyond the obscurity of the link, so it is public by definition. However, if YouTube itself or a large search engine were to index that link, it would arguably expose the material to a substantially broader audience, thus a new public, by way of the link.
Now, regarding copyright, the ruling says this new public concept is just one of several considerations. That quote about presuming those with for-profit activities should have known about copyright is actually followed immediately by an exclusion that specifically says if no new public is involved, then the whole ruling doesn't apply.
In other words, the ruling say this presumption of copyright knowledge only applies if those with for-profit activities have exposed an otherwise not-as-public link to a materially broader public. The ruling also notes that it would be even worse to publish links to not-at-all-public material, such as by intentionally circumventing authorization measures. There are a number of factors listed, each of which must be taken into account, and not only can you argue that no broader public was involved, but you can also rebut the presumption of knowledge. None of this is a new blanket rule that covers every case.
Speaking of this case, the facts are quite clear in the ruling but not really reflected well at all in TFS or TFA. The actual pictures seem to have been leaked and uploaded to some file sharing site. The link to it was provided anonymously to the news site (GS), and GS published an article with the link, along a portion of one of the images. That very same day, the copyright holder (Playboy/Sanoma) sent GS a notice that the material was not meant to be public, and requested that both the link and photo be removed. GS refused, but the linked content was soon removed from the file sharing site by someone else, at the request of Playboy. So now the link is dead, but the article with a portion of the picture remains. Meanwhile, the Internet being the Internet, before the pictures were taken down from the file sharing site, someone else of course had downloaded them then uploaded them to another file sharing site.
Then, about a week later, Playboy sends a demand to GS to remove the page with the picture and (now-dead) link. That same day, GS publishes another article, this one about the dispute, and includes there a new link to the same material now hosted on the second file sharing site. Playboy once again soon got the photos removed from this file sharing site, so now the second article's link is dead. The cycle starts again another week later, when GS posts a third article, with not only a link to yet another file sharing site, but also passively encourages forum users to download and upload the content to various other sites and share the links.
So, to summarize, GS linked to something not-quite-public (via an obscured link) and exposed it to a new public; this was found by a prior court upon appeal. Plus, GS refused to remove both the link and the photo extract, even after learning that the photo itself and the linked photos were in
So what about those search engines? They were nice while they lasted.
> I can't be expected to know
Agreed, unless it's pretty obvious that the material is probably illegally copied. Then it's reasonable to expect that before you build a business around it, you find out. Playboy content on Rapidshare? That's probably not authorized, that's fairly obvious. Actually from a pure business standpoint, nothing to do with law or ethics, you'd be stupid to have your business reliant on anything that's questionable. It's called due diligence.
I knew people who ran porn sites. They would purchase content from reputable suppliers, yet they STILL made sure that they got copies of all the relevant documentation, just in case the content producer or distributor went out of business or lost their copies or whatever. Knowing how real porn sites actually operate, it's not at all unreasonable to think they might know their content is legit - most of them actually do so. Just like the company you work for probably doesn't buy their computers out of the trunk of some guy's car in the parking lot of the supermarket.
Aside from the instances where it's pretty clear that it's sketchy, and it's a business based on this clearly suspicious stuff, I'd agree. In general, you don't know the copyright status of stuff you link to.
Of course, you SHOULD know that if you hotlink like they may have been doing, someone is likely to complain. Whether they sue you or just redirect to goatse images so you end with goatse on your page, it's likely to not work out well.
An analogy here is pandering laws applied to a pimp. "I just run a referral service for people looking for dates. I didn't know that these $200/hour women were prostituting." Yes you did, sleazebag. No, you weren't in the room when the sex occurred, but you knew damn well they were hookers.
The host of the image can reject requests to serve embedded copies of an image by examining the HTTP referer header. As such a mechanism exists, I would have thought it sensible to require hosts serving images that are not to be embedded in other pages to be configured as such. It should be the hosting servers responsibility to indicate their terms of service. All images may be copyrighted, but some people are happy to have them distributed, and others not, so the only way this can work is if the agent assumes all images are not embeddable (because it may be the wish of the copyright holder that it is not used in such a way), or there is some mandatory way for the copyright holder to indicate their wishes on the image (which can already be done by inspecting the referer header and returning an error if the site is not permitted to embed the image). The important thing here is not the copyright, but the wishes of the copyright holder with regard to the distribution of their image.
The comments I read seemed to have missed the point that the link was to illegally posted, pre-publication photos. Not just any old link. Just sayin, puts a different angle on the story, although a little less clickbaity!
In other word PRIVATE person can link and hot link as much as wanted, should only delink if warned by an entity that the material is not public. But a NEWS outfit which sell prints or view should ALWAYS check the status of the material they publish. Really do you think it is different to any photo published ? The point is that the for profit has much more burden on publishing material than Joe Q Public.
IANAL. But the court seems to be addressing the question of whether you are joining in an already-existing copyright violation if you include-by-reference something that you know is a copyright violation, and in particular if you do so for profit. They do not address the general deep-linking question (linking to material that is legit.). If someone puts something that violates copyright on a server, but the URL that addresses it is nowhere to be seen, and you then publicize the URL that points to it, they're saying you might be considered as having "made it available". Is that really unreasonable?
Sure, it is copyrighted content, but you do realize that the server handing out the copies is not the guy who provided the link? It is the copyright holder's personal web server that is the one doing the copying!
. . .if you have pay content, and are asserting copyright, why is the content directly linkable? I was under the impression that if you did not act to protect your copyright, you couldn't claim damages. And if your content is at a static URL, which is available over port 80, that's not exactly "protected". . .
"LINKING FOR PROFIT"
now we shall see a ton of news sites go bust cause the source will demand money....
but if t was free they cant charge or whatnot
Torrentfreak has a much better story on this.
"A ruling from the European Court of Justice has clarified when the posting of hyperlinks to infringing works is to be considered a 'communication to the public'. Those who post links to content they do not know is infringing in a non-commercial environment can relax, but for those doing so during the course of business the rules are much tighter."
https://torrentfreak.com/eu-court-not-for-profit-hyperlinking-usually-not-infringement-160908/
Isn't linking just asking for permission to access the resource, so if the server hosting the resource lets you have it them doesn't that mean that permission was granted?
I will be linking anything I want, whenever I want.
"Linking Without Permission Violates Copyright, Rules EU Court" suggests that all links without permission violate copyright. That's not the decision in this case. The ruling concerns links to copyrighted materials illegally stored on another site, and only links from commercial sites at that. To construe this ruling as "the end of the World Wide Web" has some have done here is silly.
Reuters, the poster and most commentards have missed the point entirely.
The case and the judgement relate to linking to copyright infringing content, see http://www.pcworld.com/article/3117094/top-eu-court-hedges-on-question-of-hyperlinking-legality-in-playboy-case.html The question considered is whether this act is equivalent to copyright infringement. It appears that the court has decided (quite reasonably) that it is.
This does NOT mean that linking to 3rd party content becomes illegal. Embedding 3rd party content in your own web site without permission is already a breach of copyright, but linking to 3rd party content on the 3rd party site (i.e. where the browser loads the 3rd party page containing the content) is not and is unlikely to become so, ever.
So not "goodbye to the web" but 'business as usual." Unfortunately the reality would not have made a story...
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