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."

Comments

Re:So In Germany

[squiggleslash]

First I'd like the point out that the law doesn't work in terms of being defined by vague analogies. If I kill someone, for example, you can't argue from that using a really clever argument that it'd be unjust to convict me of murder because it's just like if I'd driven a car and accidentally squished someone's daffodils which is totally a civil matter so there your honor I rest my case checkmate.

But to address your specific argument: No, there are multiple differences. It's usually impossible to legally make the government do anything or hold it responsible for anything. Also we're not talking about murder, which is a criminal matter, but civil law, particularly the bits relating to liability and damages and so forth.

More critically the ruling here isn't that the registrar is at fault merely because the copyright violator bought a domain from them, it's that the registrar failed to act after they were told that their customer was using the service they provided to cause (what the law says is) harm to the plaintiff.

So if the law was based on vague analogies, your analogy would still fail to sway a judge. You'd have to extend your analogy to a set of circumstances where a private road owner owns a road and continues to allow a lunatic who keeps murderizing other people driving along the same road to drive along it even after it's been pointed out that this is happening and that the person in question is cackling loudly and saying "I'm still going to murder people on this here private road, take that Hilary Rosen and Metallica!", and where it'd literally take merely an email to the right employee of the road owner, who would spend literally only one minute doing whatever is necessary to remove the lunatic because that private road owner bans people all the time.

And in that analogy, it's probably the case that the courts would rule that the road owner is at least partially responsible, in civil courts, when the families of the victims are suing for damages, for what happened.