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Pirate Bay Is Infringing Copyright, European Court of Justice Rules (theguardian.com)
The European court of justice (ECJ) has ruled that BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay is directly infringing copyright, in a move that could lead to ISPs and governments blocking access to other torrent sites across Europe. From a report: The ruling comes after a seven-year legal battle, which has seen the site, founded in Sweden in 2003, blocked and seized, its offices raided, and its three founders fined and jailed. At the heart of the case is the Pirate Bay's argument that, unlike the previous generation piracy sites like Napster, it doesn't host infringing files, nor link to them. Instead, it hosts "trackers," files which tell users of individual BitTorrent apps which other BitTorrent users to link to in order to download large files -- in the Pirate Bay's case, usually, but not exclusively, copyrighted material.
This is now a precedent.
If you have *instructions* in your possession to lead you to copyright infringement, you are guilty of infringement.
Do we have other examples?
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Or would the court find another convoluted reasoning to end up with a judgment they want?
I don't have deep understanding of the court process of the ECJ, but it was clearly a judgement call, with heavy discretionary power given to the court. Here's another quote:
“The Pirate Bay’s own statements on the matter were also held against it, the court said: “The same operators expressly display, on blogs and forums accessible on that platform, their intention of making protected works available to users, and encourage the latter to make copies of those works.”
So their goal was to convince the court that the primary purpose of the website wasn't piracy. Starting with the name "The Pirate Bay" doesn't help, although it's a great name.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Culture will happen regardless of whatever nonsense motivations you put behind it.
We were in a weird place for the past 20 years, where it wasn't clear how the artist could shed the corporate distribution, yet still make money - how to solve the logistical problem of payment, really. But now the evidence is mounting that Patreon and the like will really work for artists.
But that won't work for billion-dollar film budgets. Movies in particular remain a sticking point. It's not clear that crowdfunding can work for those. However, I'm very hopeful for a surge of indie material once "good enough" 3D animation gets cheap enough. I think crowdfunding will work fine to get competent voice actors on a project.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well I'd like to take this 'reasoning' even further.
If you are an ISP that decides to get brain damage and not act like a common carrier.... and the ISP decides to "categorize downloads, block sites, and filter out certain types of content" for the purposes of protecting the copyright of a 3rd party (or if you are in the UK because your govt just hates pron), do you suddenly become 'directly infringing' if you aren't 100% accurate?
It would appear that the argument being made is that if you do anything to the data, or even the meta data you are on the hook for its use by a 3rd party.