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.

Comments

Re:Land of the free, home of the Brave

[dugancent]

Wrong continent.

Reasoning

[phantomfive]

This is the stated reasoning of the court:

the ECJ [argued] that the Pirate Bay goes further than a protected site should, by offering not just a search feature, but also categorising files, deleting faulty trackers, and filtering out some types of content. That means, in the court’s eyes: “The operators of the platform play an essential role in making those works available.”

I still think the primary mistake was naming themselves "The Pirate Bay." They should have followed the practice that politicians use in naming bills. Call it the "Noble Defenders of Copyright Bay" or something.

Re:Reasoning

[bill_mcgonigle]

Or would the court find another convoluted reasoning to end up with a judgment they want?

The question is "what legal reasoning can we proffer that will result in more revenue for the media corporations?". The specific judgements will depend on the circumstances.

Re:Reasoning

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:Reasoning

[MrLint]

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.

Re:Reasoning

[phantomfive]

Common carrier is a US concept, not a European concept.

That said, this wasn't a question of whether you are 100% accurate or not in your filtering. It's a question of what the intentions were. The court here found that the Pirate Bay was telling people to come get protected works. TPB did not manage to make a convincing argument otherwise.

Killing of the messenger

[denis-The-menace]

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?

Re:Killing of the messenger

[cunina]

Total amount of illegal content hosted by TPB: 0 bytes.

Re:Killing of the messenger

[ljw1004]

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?

That's a wildly incorrect interpretation of the ruling. Read the judgment: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/d...

1. European law says that an author has a "right of communication to the public".
2. This case was precisely about the definition of "communication to the public".
3. It has to involve an "act of communication" and a "public".
4. An "act of communication" (according to prior case law) includes just offering links to your users. However it specifically doesn't include (according to statute) situations when you merely provide facilities that let users communicate between each other.
5. The operators of the Pirate Bay did provide links, and they did a lot more than "merely provide facilities that let users communicate with each other": they also provided a search service, provided a classification service, they themselves checked to ensure that copyright material had been placed in the appropriate category, they themselves deleted non-functioning links, and they actively filter content. Therefore they were making an act of communciation.

Your example of "instructions in your possession" fail the two tests that were the sole focus of this judgment: they are not an act of communication, and they're available to the public.

Re:Economic Victory

[MachineShedFred]

Ridiculous reasoning. Cavemen painted on the walls without having a DMCA in place, copyright protection, or a mega-corporation offering them exclusive perpetual distribution rights contracts.

Culture will happen regardless of whatever nonsense motivations you put behind it. An artist doesn't stop being an artist because people that weren't going to buy the art anyway, in fact, don't buy their art.

Whack-a-mole

[bool2]

Where is the TOR equivalent of these sites? Surely that's where this game of whack-a-mole is headed - the lawless dark web.

Re:Economic Victory

[lgw]

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.

Re:Economic Victory

[Tom]

But that won't work for billion-dollar film budgets. Movies in particular remain a sticking point.

Copyright infringement is a problem, sure. However, even with all the torrent sites, movie budgets have been constantly increasing, and profits are great (if you ignore the Hollywood account that makes the most successful movies lose money on paper).

Hollywood is doing great. The focus on the AAA movies is completely misguided. We should turn our eyes to the smaller movies, the indie movies and such and check what the result there is. Hollywood blockbusters, like the five or six times before that they cried and at least one time swore under oath that something needs to be done or they're out of business, Hollywood blockbusters are doing just fine.