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Another Question Of Search Engine Legality and Infringement 95

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the what-if-the-judge-is-a-tech-moron dept.
Another question of search engine "legality" is being addressed with a recent court case in the UK over a video search engine. Techdirt's coverage questions the long-standing tradition of how to evaluate contributory infringement claims for sites like search engines based on the highly subjective "I know it when I see it" test. "Take for example, the situation going on in the UK, where Anton Benjamin Vickerman and his wife Kelly-Anne Vickerman decided to do something that makes a lot of sense: create a search engine for videos online, indexing a variety of different sites. This was as a part of their company Scopelight, and the search engine itself was called Surfthechannel. This is certainly a useful product. But, of course, the search engine's algorithm has no way of knowing if that video has been put up by the copyright holder on purpose or if it's unauthorized. Even more tricky, how does it determine fair use? So, it did the reasonable thing: it includes everything. Lots of the videos are legal. Plenty are potentially unauthorized. Apparently that wasn't good enough for a UK-based anti-piracy group UK-FACT, who had Scopelight's premises raided, claiming the site is illegal, since people can find unauthorized content via it. Of course, you can find unauthorized content on Google as well. But you know who's liable for that? Whoever actually put it online. Not the search engine that pointed you to it."
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Another Question Of Search Engine Legality and Infringement

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  • by jacquesm (154384) <j&ww,com> on Friday June 26 2009, @02:14PM (#28485983) Homepage

    In many countries it is now illegal to link to infringing content, it will take the likes of google to be sued before we'll get a real precedent because only they have enough money to take it all the way to the highest courts.

    Linking should be ok, no matter what the content, after all, if you link to one of my sites I can replace the contents of that site after the fact by something that is copyrighted, in no way should an action by me make you liable. This will decide the future of the web.

  • Law enforcement (Score:3, Interesting)

    by doas777 (1138627) on Friday June 26 2009, @02:21PM (#28486095)
    It seems to me that the powers that be have it backward. instead of using technology to enforce the law, they should use it to make the law irrelevant. The internet could have saved us from many laws, but no, they just went and wrote more of them.
  • by T Murphy (1054674) on Friday June 26 2009, @02:23PM (#28486115) Journal
    If they cannot stop infringement as long as the internet as we know it exists, then enforcing laws that break the internet sounds like a great way to solve the problem. Maybe they do know what they're doing.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2009, @02:36PM (#28486277)

    For a fee for them of course (in the form of ads I'm sure)

    Getting paid to tell people where to go to easily break the law. What a racket.

    If some creepy guy was lurking on a street corner, trying to sell information on where to go to rape some kidnap victims, would that be ok?

    Since he didn't kidnap them, and he can't actually _make_ you rape them, he is a blameless angel, no?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2009, @02:43PM (#28486345)

    So, we should arrest people who own DNS servers because they point to IP addresses that could host a webserver with illegal content?

  • by Ralph Spoilsport (673134) on Friday June 26 2009, @02:44PM (#28486353) Journal
    There's a site that uses Google search systems to find music on blogs called chewbone. [blogspot.com] It's been a great tool for me. I have a few thousand vinyl records I've collected since the early 70s, and a lot of it is really obscure weird shit that never made CD, and I'll be damned if I'm going to piss several thousand hours away digitising it. A few here and there, sure. But not the bulk. So, it's much easier to search and find other people who have done a few and uploaded them. Saves tons of time and effort.

    The problem is, chewbone is regularly slammed by Google for his efforts. Bunch of assholes, IMHO. (chewbone - if you're reading this - hat's off, dude. Thanks!)

    RS

  • by brit74 (831798) on Friday June 26 2009, @02:48PM (#28486405)
    I don't see the problem with what they (Scopelight) were doing. As long as they are connecting to infringing websites, then authorities can go after the websites themselves (rather than the search engine).

    I'll also add that this is not the same thing as PirateBay, since PirateBay is a torrent tracker - the people uploading/downloading information aren't websites, but they are located at an ever-shifting number of changing IP addresses. Heck, they could be at a coffeeshop's free wifi while filesharing - and who can possibly track them down? Further, the PirateBay goes out of their way to hide filesharers identities.
  • by Penguinoflight (517245) on Friday June 26 2009, @03:28PM (#28486889) Homepage Journal

    The problem with that argument is two-fold. First, once the media has already been made publicly available the status of legal protection for said media could be considered inactive. Copyrighted materials that are not actively protected are not subject to litigation. On the other hand, the original infringer may have removed any copyright notice or distribution limitations that would have flagged the work.

    It is the responsibility of the copyright holding company to inform viewers of the limitations.
    Arguing that a redistributor is infringing seems to shirk the responsibility of the copyright holder.

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