Hyperlinking Is Not Copyright Infringement, EU Court Rules 97
Freshly Exhumed writes "Does publishing a hyperlink to freely available content amount to an illegal communication to the public and therefore a breach of creator's copyrights under European law? After examining a case referred to it by Sweden's Court of Appeal, the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled today that no, it does not. The Court found that 'In the circumstances of this case, it must be observed that making available the works concerned by means of a clickable link, such as that in the main proceedings, does not lead to the works in question being communicated to a new public.'" Reader Bart Smit points to the court's ruling.
Internet 101 (Score:1)
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Is publishing an URL (or QR or equivalent) legally the same as rendering a HTML <a href="..."> hyperlink?
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I don't see why not. I guess it's not mandatory that the search engine publishes any kind of link to the original content whatsoever. But I think they lose fair use status if they publish more than a small percentage of the original, so I'm not sure what utility such a search engine would have.
Map Analogy (Score:2)
Sure. I understand portals and hyperlinks as Yellow Pages irl. Nobody is going to sue Yellow Pages or other newspapers because they published an address of some fraudulent business or shop with "original" goods.
Re:Internet 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet before search depended on hyperlinking.
Even that aside, 'hyperlinking' is pretty much an improved flavor of citation. If you are going to ban 'hyperlinks to illegal material' you are this close to just banning the mere mention of illegal material; except easier to sell because there are scary computer words involved.
Whether you see this as ironic, or as a continuation of copyright's original purpose, it is simply a matter of fact that the defenders of this sort of 'property' are learning that doing what they want requires rolling back all sorts of long-held rights. Worse, they seem OK with this.
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TPB legit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:TPB legit? (Score:5, Interesting)
A Very interesting flow-on understanding.
As they technically don't host any infringing materials, they shouldn't be anything but legit - though I think they get hit with something along the lines of "conspiracy to enable infrigement" or some such muck - in which case, this might not actually have any bearing.
Re:TPB legit? (Score:5, Interesting)
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hyperlinks are still illegal in the US ... Rights are available in the US only if you are rich enough to afford them.
From the American Library Association
Hypertext Linking and Copyright Issues [ala.org]
As the cases above suggest, the law is not yet clear on what constitutes acceptable practice in linking to other people's Web sites. In most instances, however, it appears that linking in itself (whether deep linking or not) should not create legal problems unless there are extenuating circumstances. Setting up links to someone else's website is not the same thing as republishing information (the linking site does not actually store the linked site's information--it just directs the user to that information). Therefore, it seems unlikely that linking can reasonably be seen as copyright infringement absent those extenuating circumstances.
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Copy machines aren't illegal. Making copies is not illegal. Distributing copies is illegal. Learn your copyright law.
captcha: deluding - oddly appropriate
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Re:TPB legit? (Score:4, Informative)
Hasn't TPB's legal status always been 'We can't actually find any laws that they violate; but they just look so damn uppity and illegal that we couldn't possibly let them walk!'?
Well. More or less.
The prosecutor Hakan Roswall [wikipedia.org] did some research a couple of month before the raid and wrote a report were he came to the conclusion that what TPB did was legal.
Then the minister of justice Thosmas Bodstrom [wikipedia.org] got a mail from the US government saying that they wanted TPB to get shut down so he called the prosecutor to his office and had a talk with him. (This is by the way illegal in Sweden, a minister isn't allowed to directly dictate what should happen. Regulations should be done through laws to make sure that they are enforced equally.)
Then the police investigated the whole thing. After this another interesting thing happened. The officer Jim Keyse who was leading the investigation took a vacation. During this vacation he was on Warner Brothers payroll.
I guess the reason the TPB-guys went to jail was more in the lines of coercion and bribes.
Re:TPB legit? (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually, this is what the ruling says:
Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, must be interpreted as meaning that the provision on a website of clickable links to works freely available on another website *does not constitute an ‘act of communication to the public’*, as referred to in that provision.
Creating a link is *not* an act of commu
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TBP doesn't even link to them! All they provide is a number (presented as an alphanumeric string) and a few links to public content-neutral trackers.
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Actually, I think you should probably have highlighted "as referred to in that provision". The paragraph two before the one you quoted said "That additional circumstance in no way alters the conclusion that the provision on a site of a clickable link to a protected work published and freely accessible on another site has the effect of making that work available to users of the first site and that it therefore constitutes a communication to the public. However, since there is no new public, the authorisation
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But conspiracy would apply to regular links too wouldn't it?
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They don't even link to infringing material. They link to material that links to infringing material.
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No they don't, they link to information that contains an infohash or to a file containing swarm and file information to a group that may or may not be sharing copy-written data, dependent upon the users location and fair use rights.
Lots of maybes there..
No, this case is linking to the rightful owner (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not similar. In this case, the plaintiff complained that someone linked to them, apparently within a iframe or something. Nobody linked to unlawful or "pirated" material. The (silly) claim was that linking to Slashdot would violate Slashdot's copy rights.
TBP llinks to unlawful material, and exists primarily for the purpose of assisting in the unlawful distribution of material. They are therefore committing "contributory infringement" - they are contributing to a direct infringement. In the inst
knock knock, anyone home? It's PIRATE bay (Score:2)
It's PIRATE bay, not PromoteYourFreeSoftwareBay.
It's for pirating (aka unlawfully taking my work while telling my baby to go fuck herself, she doesn't need to eat because you're a selfish dick who chose to trade in your integrity rather than fork over the $25 for my work that you want to have so badly.
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IMO, you can argue either way:
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Where your'e wrong is two places:
1. All these concepts you speak of (private property, democracy) are just aspirations which are only effective if they can be enforced by direct force or by established and successfully maintained social structure and mechanisms of social pressure to conform to rules and norms. There is no "God-given" anything (such as "right to private property), because it is a given that there is no God (except, again, as a socially constructed collectively maintained concept: a meme if y
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No, according to the decision hyperlinking is allowed as long as it does not communicate the work to a new public. Linking to protected work in a way that would make it available to a new public (torrent files make stuff available to people that is not otherwise available to them) would not be concerned by this decision.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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This ruling only applies to copyrighted content that is legally and publicly available. Linking to content that is behind e.g. a paywall would constitute a copyright-infringement.
Wait, how can it be a problem to link to content *behind* a paywall. Either the person clicking the link will not be able to get to the link as the content is behind a paywall and they haven't paid, or, they have paid, have rights to the content, and can get to it by following the link. Is there some other possibility?
all the best,
drew
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In the same way you'd use the law if someone was in your house because you forgot to lock the door? The whole "Oh gee, I didn't realize I wasn't in public space anymore because nothing stopped me from going here so I'm totally innocent." doesn't work in real life, honestly why do you expect it to work online? Particularly when there's good reason to believe the person knew he was behind the front door that was supposed to keep him out and he's busy cleaning the place out of valuables.
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Not me. If I come home from work and find someone I don't know sitting on my couch reading, they're going to jail. Period. Even if the door is unlocked it's breaking and entering and a violation of my rights. You don't just walk into someone's house and read their books, especially since those books are free at the library.
Hey, you, get offa my cloud!
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I'd have to admit it would be strange to get back home and find someone there reading a book. I'd prefer it to having all my stuff gone - if the intruder said "I saw your door was left open, so I came in to stop anyone from stealing your stuff and while I was waiting I read this book - hope you don't mind" then I doubt that I'd call the
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This situation is more similar to you living in a house that is 50% open to the public. You then forget to lock the dividing door and are shocked when people wonder into the part where they are not supposed to be - even when it is not marked that THIS part of the house is not meant for the public.
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Then again, . . Who cares about copyright infringement, because its fucking censorship and prevents others from improving on or making use of information and knowledge. Similiarly, fuck patents and trademarks, too
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You seem to completely misunderstand copyright. You cannot copyright information or knowledge, all you can copyright is your communication of that information and knowledge. You can write a book about communication protocols, and I can read your book and write my own based on what I learned from yours, and there's nothing you can do about it. I have not infringed your copyright, I have not copied your work, I have created a new work and possibly, if I've learned from others as well or discovered something i
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I do not confuse copyright. I literally think it's used to control information, give people ability to censor and take information down, and make it hard to get by either not selling it or by requiring payment first.
An example of copyright being used for censorship is the videos on YouTube. People made recordings of videogames, usually their own gameplay, because who doesn't like to keep videos and show the world what it's like when they play it? OR some people made reviews and/or put it together in a "podc
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The deal is, I sort of think all information should be free, and copyright should be extremely limited, maybe to the original product only and only for 10 years. I believe in content archival, people not owning information (even a book or video or software is knowledge and information). I believe all content if it exists should be open and available for people to experience, without stupid laws that prevent it (which is what copyright is). It also conflicts with personal liberty, because it gives the copyri
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But intent to contribute to infringement on a mass scale should be
I disagree. Intent in and of itself should never be against the law. I could say, "Please everyone go out and download games and films and music and commit as much copyright infringement as possible." Maybe some people will be persuaded to do just that, but I have no direct control over such people. They are responsible for their own actions and decisions.
I could also tell people to consume illegal drugs and tell them on what street corner they can find some. None of that should be illegal. It's all communi
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Also only applicable to the EU.
I doubt a court in East Texas or Montana would have such a socialist view.
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If it's on the internet, on a publicly available web server and not locked down - say, behind some sort of security barrier that requires a username/password or similar - then no one should consider linking to it a problem.
I think it could reasonably be argued that a link to material that is then displayed in a frame that inappropriately attributes the material would be infringing. E.g., a page with links to images, which when clicked display in an enclosing frame that says "Hey look at the great image I made." And, unfortunately, I've had exactly that problem on a website I run where a TV station was using my images and missattributing them. The only solution I could come up with was adding a watermark.
The ruling is specif
I'm confused (Score:2)
(but as my wife would say.... what else is new?)
Anyways... If the content is already freely available, then the content is already available to the public, isn't it? in what way would a hyperlink constitute an illegal communication to the public when the content itself is, in fact, already public?
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(but as my wife would say.... what else is new?)
Anyways... If the content is already freely available, then the content is already available to the public, isn't it? in what way would a hyperlink constitute an illegal communication to the public when the content itself is, in fact, already public?
"Public" doesn't necessarily imply "legally public".
To me, the ruling says: "No matter about the legality of a freely available piece on the Internet, whoever links to it is not guilty of breaking any law".
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My point being that if they had ever had any legitimate right to do so, then by definition, the content would not have been "freely available".
Wait a second... (Score:2)
Didn't I read the opposite [slashdot.org] just yesterday?
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Didn't I read the opposite [slashdot.org] just yesterday?
No, that case was different since he copied the files and shared them from an own server. Had he linked to the originals he would have been safe according to this ruling.
Thanks for clearing up that minefield of unclarity (Score:1)
Maybe not so great (Score:2)
There's an interesting analysis from copyright lawyer Innocenzo Genna [wordpress.com] that suggests this may not be such good news for the Internet as it seems at first glance.
The copyright-controlled activity that was under discussion was "communicating a copyright work to the public". The court decided that hyperlinking was communicating the work to the public, but ruled that it was still permitted by way of exception, because the work has already been communicated to the same public. According to Genna, this still bring
Then this should be appealed (Score:2)
So the french blogger who was fined 3000 euros [slashdot.org] should now have a good reason to appeal his judgement, as the documents he linked to actually was publicly available?
no, I get it.. (Score:1)
I do not confuse copyright. I literally think it's used to control information, give people ability to censor and take information down, and make it hard to get by either not selling it or by requiring payment first.
An example of copyright being used for censorship is the What You Play videos on YouTube. People made recordings of videogames, usually their own gameplay, because who doesn't like to keep videos and show the world what it's like when they play it? OR some people made reviews and/or put it toget