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Domain Registrar Can be Held Liable for Pirate Site, Court Rules (torrentfreak.com)
The Higher Regional Court of Saarbrucken (a city in Germany) concluded Key-Systems, a German-based registrar, can be held secondarily liable for the infringing actions of a customer if it fails to take action if rightsholders point out "obvious" copyright infringing activity online. From a report: This means that, if a site owner is unresponsive to takedown requests, Key-Systems and other registrars can be required to take a domain name offline, even when the infringing activity is limited to a single page. The local music group BVMI is happy with the outcome of the case. They believe it will help copyright holders to take action against infringing activity. "This is a further important clarification in the legal space of the internet, helping it to become clearer and fairer for creatives and their partners," says Rene Houareau, BVMI's Managing Director Legal & Political Affairs. "The [court] affirms, with clearly outlined criteria, the responsibility of so-called registrars and thus gives affected rightsholders an important legal tool to defend themselves against the unlawful use of their content on the internet."
So who is required to pay for the employees who will filter and handle the incoming torrent of bogus takedown requests?
Domain registrars outside of German (EU?) jurisdiction may have just gained a competitive advantage.
Thanks, Disney.
Thanks, Mickey Mouse.
And fuck you and your servants in Europe, too.
I hole-hardedly agree, but allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality. I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go. Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn't take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It's clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the facts. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother's mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like it's a peach of cake.
to access web sites without using DNS names. /s
I mean it's kind of hard to type in AAAA addresses, but you can always bookmark it once you've typed it correctly.
If a licensed driver kills another motorist on the road, is the government held liable for provisioning the murderer a license?
I fail to see the logic this court used.
I mean, why not just take the entire top-level domain down if there is an infringing page somewhere? Since we are going for the disproportional response, we might as well take it all the way...
Could it be coming to your country next? Let's hope not.
You can almost see Hollywood salivating.
Say I use Google Maps to find my local drug dealer; is Google now liable for anything I do whilst drugged out of my mind?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
im guessing will be shaking in their boots. they destroyed an entire industry overnight by blatant copyright abuse, but now they might have to worry.
Great, I will just assume everything on the Internet is legal then. Happy torrent time!
So, exactly how unresponsive does a site have to be for this to apply? I mean, it's well understood that Google.com links to pirate content and Youtube.com actually hosts tons of pirate content. Sure, they're "responsive" to requests to take content down, but they're quite horrible at keeping content off. Does all it take is something the courts view as a good faith effort? Or does it take a sort of responsiveness that comes being proactive enough to actually keep people from just reposting stuff and getting past some automated filters?
Forget even getting to actually illegal content. I understand the desire to hold registrars responsible when hosts refuse to be, but it still seems a bit odd to me. If the hosts are outside your jurisdiction but the registrar is, I can see why they'd be the target. If the hosts are in your jurisdiction, I don't see why a registrar would ever have reason to become involved; it's up to the courts to properly judicially handle the host. It doesn't sound like that's actually the discussion that ever occurred though. To me, that's very disturbing.
It doesn't matter that legal sites will continue to use DNS. A censorship resistant name space will emerge and it will be free, so eventually everybody will use it. Porn drives technology adoption and piracy drives the elimination of single-points-of-failure.
Our courts support companies that take taxpayer funded research and lock it behind paywalls, stealing from the country, simply because they're getting paid.
Private DNS servers and IP addresses.
And people wonder why there's such a massive disparity when it comes to big internet corporations between Europe and the rest of the world.
In the EU (and Germany in particular) companies are hamstrung from the start. If they still manage to hobble to the starting line, the government just shoots them into the head with a live starter pistol for good measure.
...clearer and "fair*er" for creatives and their parasites.... FTFY
* "fair" : getting what one wants (without regard to equity or any other consideration)
As they don't have a clue what they are doing!
If a licensed driver kills another motorist on the road, is the government held liable for provisioning the murderer a license?
I fail to see the logic this court used.
I know this is going to sound like Europe bashing and it's really not. I've been to Europe a lot. Used to work for a European company. I'm really not anti-Europe. But I'm going to tell you how this kind of thing happens and I'm probably not going to get voted up enough to get noticed, but here goes.
1) European countries don't have freedom of speech similar to the USA. So this means that while freedom of speech in the USA can cover a variety of legal matters that aren't really "speech" as such, it can't happen in Europe. In fact, you can actually go to jail for years for saying stuff in Europe that they don't like. Not for doing bad things. For saying things they don't like.
2) EU justice (outside of maybe the departing UK and France) is pretty bogus. Really bad, horrible things that might get you locked up forever in the USA get sentences of say, 10 years, which to a European seems to be an insanely long time to punish someone. Remember that guy in Norway who shot over 70 people? If he lives a normal lifespan he'll probably have 2 more chances in his life to break his own record after getting released because locking up a killer for life is evil according to most of the EU and apparently Norway simply can't keep him locked up more than 25 years for mass murder.
3) So the fact that the EU doesn't have free speech and they feel sorry for criminals has led to another situation where once you get out of jail for your heinous crimes, you can petition legally for the criminal record to be wiped. It's like you never dd it.
So yes, a society that doesn't value victims at all and feels sorry for criminals and doesn't respect free speech might just have some really interesting ideas about internet piracy and who is actually liable.
Fuck the court, fuck the judges, fuck the MPAA/RIAA.
The MPAA/RIAA and their global equivalents are the "biggest" pirates that ever sailed the seas or walked the earth. They come in higher than all corrupt politicians and greedy lawyers combined.
Once we eradicate the MPAA/RIAA and their ilk, the world will be a much happier place.
You mean your testicles and flacid phalii? Since you seem to prefer to be considered a little girl right?
Trump had enough winning yet?
So can someone hack BVMI's website, host a non linked page with lots of violations and get them taken off the internet?
When did Western nations become so rabid about copyright enforcement that they are willing to extend liability so insanely? Individuals liable for millions of dollars of copyright infringements for a handful of songs. Linking to sites is becoming sources of liability, registering a domain is now a source of liability, merely making software that could possibly be used for enforcement is a source of liability, running a file-sharing web site is a source of liability, reverse-engineering and writing research papers are sources of liability... What dystopian author could have imagined that something as mundane as copyright law would become the force of economic damage and oppression?
We are going backwards. A few years ago we reached some kind of balance, where almost any media I wanted could be purchased or downloaded without DRM for a reasonable price. Now I have to subscribe to 5 different streaming services to get access to it all, and half of those places require me to stream it through that companies' app or device. PLEASE PLEASE start buying DVDs and CDs again, or we will be back in the situation of the around Y2K when you were almost forced to pirate anything to get access to it. Only THIS time, they've closed the analog hole.
F em. people will just transfer domains to out of country registrars with the balls to tell Germany to go fuck themselves.
Let Germany figure out ways to filter them at the edge.
Wieder ein Haufen alter Leute, ohne eine Ahnung davon zu haben, WIE etwas funktioniert und versuchen zu bestimmen, wie es funktionieren soll.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
A better analogy would be holding the Yellow Pages liable for listing Sarah Connor.
Germany is a civil law country. As in civil-ized.
A single court case in a Podunk German town is nothing but a single court case in a Podunk German town.
Thus, a country doesn't get turned upside down every time a senile judge in Lower Bumfuck forgets his meds.
https://www.economist.com/the-...
Although common-law systems make extensive use of statutes, judicial cases are regarded as the most important source of law, which gives judges an active role in developing rules.
For example, the elements needed to prove the crime of murder are contained in case law rather than defined by statute.
To ensure consistency, courts abide by precedents set by higher courts examining the same issue.
In civil-law systems, by contrast, codes and statutes are designed to cover all eventualities and judges have a more limited role of applying the law to the case in hand.
Past judgments are no more than loose guides.
When it comes to court cases, judges in civil-law systems tend towards being investigators, while their peers in common-law systems act as arbiters between parties that present their arguments.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
After all, the expansion of TLDs to private corporations means that they have been facilitating piracy by allowing dozens to hundreds of new tlds an infringing entity can reregister their sld on while keeping it memorable to their infringement using customer base.
Who here doesn't think the loss of ICANN would be a net benefit to society as new non-centralized alternatives spring up.
What does "can be required to..." even mean?
My understanding is that it's verbal or written sleight of hand similar to "you need to..." in other words, to add apparent weight to "I want you to..."
Requiem for the American Dream