Web Browsing Isn't Copyright Infringement, Rules EU Court of Justice 79
mpicpp (3454017) writes with this news from Ars Technica: 'Europeans may browse the Internet without fear of infringing copyrights, as the EU Court of Justice ruled Thursday in a decision that ends a four-year legal battle threatening the open Internet. It was the European top court's second wide-ranging cyber ruling in less than a month. The court ruled May 13 that Europeans had a so-called "right to be forgotten" requiring Google to delete "inadequate" and "irrelevant" data upon requests from the public. That decision is spurring thousands of removal requests. In this week's case, the court slapped down the Newspaper Licensing Agency's (NLA) claim that the technological underpinnings of Web surfing amounted to infringement. The court ruled that "on-screen copies and the cached copies made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website satisfy the conditions" of infringement exemptions spelled out in the EU Copyright Directive. The NLA's opponent in the case was the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). The PR group hailed the decision.'
Re:Copyright ending (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Their arguments are illogical (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. Clearly we need Brain-HDCP! It would solve everything!
Kind regards, the MPAA.
P.S. HNCP would be more apt, I guess.
Re:Their arguments are illogical (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright law is mostly there. It specifically allows for incidental copies made to use software for example. So you don't need a separate license to move it from the CD to the hard drive, from the hard drive to the drive controller cash, to RAM, to L1 cache, to L2 cache, and to video memory, along with the copy that gets shunted to the backup tape system at night....
That all media should be extended the same incidental copyright exclusion should be a nobrainer, but yeah, until its settled we get idiots thinking the image on screen is infringement, the image in your browser cache is infringement, and by golly, and if ~thats~ not infringement, then its surely infringment when you do a complete PC back up that night and your browser cache ends up duplicated onto your external USB drive along with everything else. You dirty criminal.
Good on the EU court for setting a precedent.
Re:Copyright ending (Score:2, Insightful)
It will certainly have a better effect on the economy, since they are poor it is because of 1 of 2 reasons:
They are no good at making money (No net change if they get bribed)
They are really good at spending money (All bribe money flows right back into the economy!).
I think it is a good thing for the economy to have more poor congresscritters!
Remember; Rich people are usually a varying combination of:
1) Don't spend money on shit you don't need (until you have so much that you can afford to spend a tiny tiny amount on lambos and hookers)
2) Really Really good at convincing other people to give them money (be it for being a superstar CEO, got a lot of power thus get a lot of bribes, setting up a legal scenario that makes people or the government pay them more money than they would if they didn't setup some legal scheme)
3) Were born with so much money they have to be *really* dumb to end up with none.
Very very few rich people are:
4) So talented that they actually earned it by being super smart, and careful with their plans until someone bought so much of their superior product/service that they ended up rich.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they are fundamentally stupid. They think that everybody needs to view their sites (i.e. that they have a needed, irreplaceable good), so controlling all access gives them maximum impact. What actually happens is that they are a luxury good and people just stop caring about their product when it gets hard to access. Kind of like the music industry classifying each illegal download as a "lost sale", when the reality is that people just would do without if copying it was difficult. Many younger artists understand that now and are putting samples or their full works on the web, because the only way to make somebody pay for content is if they are willing to pay for content. And for the customers willing to pay, putting everything up for free and asking for donations works just as well and without all the stupidity that DRM and copyright restrictions for non-commercial copying brings with it.
The newspapers really are are primarily responsible for their own decline.
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would give them twin business models: subscriptions for the people willing to pay, infringement shakedowns for the people who aren't willing to pay.
What I'd like to know is if:
The court ruled that "on-screen copies and the cached copies made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website satisfy the conditions" of infringement exemptions spelled out in the EU Copyright Directive.
applies to streaming video websites as well.
In Today's Improbable News (Score:2, Insightful)
The EU Court of Justice makes a judgement that is rational, implementable, and conforms to what 99.999% of citizens want, while only PO'ing the remaining 0.001% who, if they cannot accept this judgement, can opt out of publishing on the Internet.
It's a miracle!!