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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.
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
News headline from the future:
[Online News Corporation] sued in EU court for providing basic descriptions of [Media Company]'s content.
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....
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
Good thing the UK is leaving the EU.
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?
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?
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."
It's liberal in the sense that mild socialism falls on the liberal end of the scale.
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.
And before that, if you wrote a novel, you didn't just print it and sell copies to the public, where anyone could copy it. You printed one copy, put it behind lock and key and only let someone read it when you could be there to be sure they wouldn't take it away or make a copy of it. Right?
Er, wait.
It would seem copy has more rights than people.
except that a hyperlink is not a reproduction, per se.
it has more in common with a proper periodical literature citation. you know, the kind that can help you find a whole magazine stored on a library shelf?
the significant difference here, is that instead of having to go to a library, locate the periodicals shelf, and then locate the cited periodical all by yourself, you have a fancy software agent that asks another software agent inside the library to find it for you, and check you out a copy automatically.
unless you want to say a citation is the same as the work it references, (which is nonsense), a hyperlnk and a citation are functionally analogous, and the use of one should be protected accordingly.
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
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.
Its turtles all the way down.
Have gnu, will travel.
Not protecting access to your images and other content (many sites use such protection) is akin to scattering money on the sidewalk instead of keeping it in your pocket. They have no just cause for complaint and the court decision is insane.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Now that's comedy!
This space unintentionally left blank.
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.
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 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!
I've done that too. I posted a picture on my own server and linked to it in a post on Digg (Back when Digg was actually respectable and had a community). Then someone used that link in their Gaia Online profile. I wouldn't have minded if the profile was actually any good, but it was some hideous wall of jumbled images with background midi, like some throwback to the 90s.
So I made a quick script to check the referrer. Everyone else still got the original image, but anyone with Gaia as their referrer got... well, I'll leave the details to your imagination. Suffice to say it was a piece of furry art, adult in nature, and involved a bird.
. . .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". . .
And it still makes no sense.
Copyright:
"the exclusive right to make copies, license, and otherwise exploit a literary, musical, or artistic work, whether printed, audio, video, etc."
Nowhere is it mentioned whether or not there has to be a commercial incentive to speak of copyright(-infringement). It's actually nonsensical to claim so. If I write a book, and you copy it verbatim and *give it away for free*.... you think that is not copyright-infringement?
I very much doubt such a premise, yet the court here came up with that.. pulling it out of their ass, clearly.
But this case goes further than that. A link, on itself, does not constitute a copyright-infringement: no copy has been made by the link. Those who made the copyright violation is the party that put it on the site. The link itself is merely a reference to it. If I say: there and there you can find a physical book to read, am now infringing copyright, if the book was made without authorization, but wasn't made by me? In the physical world, no court would even dream claiming that, yet they claim it without thinking if exactly the same happens 'digitally' on the internet.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Agree
This is the correct way to solve direct loading of images, not courts... change the image and let the other side suffer by the mistake :)
If they copy the images, apply copyright... if they update the link, keep changing it or use the referer... it is a lost battle for the abusive site.
you can also simply block serving the images without the correct referer, but messing other people sites is way better
Higuita
Yes it is. But it seems you didn't RTFS. You can't grant permission to stuff that isn't yours.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
"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.
Netcraft confirms it!
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