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

So who is required to pay...

[Bradmont]

So who is required to pay for the employees who will filter and handle the incoming torrent of bogus takedown requests?

Re:So who is required to pay...

[sabri]

The court that does not understand anything about the matter they're ruling on, of course.

Re:So who is required to pay...

[Dunbal]

Magic and fairies. Actually the registrar should reply to anyone who sends a takedown request with a bill for the takedown. Start at what, $5000? No no we will comply and take it down, but first we have to verify and to do that we need to hire staff, so here's the bill. If there's infringing material it will be down in a month or so...

Re: So who is required to pay...

[Shikaku]

It's a fake troll account. Probably won't ever post again if you flag it.

I hole-hardedly agree...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

If there was only a way

[bobstreo]

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.

So In Germany

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Why stop there?

[johannesg]

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...

Re:Why stop there?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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...

Not quite the whole way.

Take down the Internet.

We all know it's just about piracy and free porn, anyhow.

Re:Unresponsive to Takedown Requests

[AHuxley]

Germany gets to set what "truth" can be published and who can speak, read and comment.

Think like a German government that has to legally protect "democracy".
What "democracy" is can be set by any German government after an election.
Thats the full force of the police and courts to protect "democracy".
That will allow "history" "art" "politics" "culture" "cartoons" to be removed from the internet.

Say the person who posted the content is on holiday, at work. That content not approved by a German government stays up for hours and days.
The next legal attempt for more total control by a German government is to go further "up" the internet.
The "publication" is by the account owner and further push back legally is not the original publisher.
Germany goes after the creator but finds the content has still been seen too many times.
How to stop the internet from working in Germany quickly and directly?
Germany courts go up a level and demands full internet control.
Make the internet stop working in Germany until the content is removed.
Publishing any type of truth in Germany is not free of constant German government supervision.
Germany has the legal options for people who want to publish truth. Police interviews, fines, jail.
East and West Germany and later Germany had strong power over on publication, speech, politics, art, who can fund publications from the 1950's to the 1990s.
From any printing press, to a book shop, the bank account of a book shop, to any political group/person attempting to print/publish.
The free US internet set German government control on publication and speech back for a while.
The full power of the German government is now back in courts.
The German author and publisher has no protections. The bank used by the publisher and author has no protections.
The tools used to publish in Germany have no protections.
The building used to publish in German has no ...
When a German government wants to stop any truth, it can go in a few hops from any attempts at freedom of speech.
Wealth, buildings, tools, equipment, people, banks are all part of the courts ability to fully stop all further publication in Germany.
The German government will find new laws to stop the all digital internet. Just like Germany it did for book, publications, magazines, pamphlets, cartoons, music, art.

The German legal system is back and it has a years of US style freedom to catch up on AC.
German law is not odd, its about total government control over truth.
The US has freedom of speech and freedom after speech.
Germany has interviews, police action, fines and jail when speech is attempted.

Re:Competitive advantage

[anegg]

Having a government "confiscate" a domain name is so much better than making a registrar responsible for responding to a 3rd party request. The registrar is not a government authority and should not be in the position of acting as one, as it will probably give the 3rd parties too much power (the registrar will act out of self-preservation and probably err on the side of caution). Insane.

Here's the logic

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

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.

Re:Here's the logic

[jaa101]

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

You're comparing Europe to the United States, which has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, and the largest prison population in the world. Naturally almost every other country appears bogus.

No one. There won't be an incoming torrent.

[denzacar]

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.