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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.
are now completely f****'ed....
"You're linking to a party that is legally hosting the content, how is that infringement?"
It isn't. It's no different than saying "go to the library to read this book" (although the action of going to the library becomes more automatic, since it's done for the user by the browser). The "linker" isn't involved in either delivering or receiving the content, and they're not a party to any copying. It's entirely up to the content provider if they want to deliver content which is linked from off-site.
This is just a case of a content provider being lazy by not going through the work of denying content linked from off-site, and trying to push their responsibility onto someone else.
The decision is a step towards further Balkanization of the web, which is based on hyperlinks.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I don't see how this burden to search companies is a reason to weaken the rights of copyright holders.
Image thumbnails in search results would probably be covered under fair use no?
Frankly I'm surprised that copyright wasn't already enforced this way. Documents viewed on the world wide web are these ethereal things that are composed on the fly by client browser software as instructed by web server software. If the web server software instructs the client software to present a document which mixes non-copyright-infringing and copyright-infringing content, it seems eminently reasonable to me that this would be copyright infringement.
What if I distributed a bunch of mini printing presses that, when you pressed a button, produced a perfect copy of this year's best selling novel? Sure, I didn't actually distribute the novel, but I enabled a mechanism whereby the user, when using my device as intended, would end up with a copyright infringing document.
I think of the web browser in the same way. The servers tell it what to display. Therefore, if they tell it to display something that violates copyright, then the server has violated copyright.
Here's how I would make the rules if I could:
- Publishing web pages with links to copyrighted content where those links cause the display of the copyrighted content inline in the linking document, would violate copyright
- Publishing web pages with links to copyrighted content where those links do not cause the display of the copyrighted content inline in the linking document, but instead merely lead the user to the content, would not violate copyright
Analog: you can publish instructions on where to go to listen to a copyrighted song. You cannot publish a document which plays the copyrighted song to the user.
The problem was that they knowingly linked to copyright infringing material
No they didnt. They linked to a file hosting service that had links to the copyrighted material.
You are missing the part where 3 different parties are involved.
(A) The owners of the copyright
(B) The site hosting and linking to the content
(C) The site linking to (B)'s web page that links to and hosts the content.
This can be translated into: "A law was broken, and god damn it someone.. anyone... must pay!"
"His name was James Damore."
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
It would seem copy has more rights than people.