Domain Registrar Can be Held Liable for Pirate Site, Court Rules (torrentfreak.com) 95
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."
So who is required to pay... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So who is required to pay... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: So who is required to pay... (Score:1, Offtopic)
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It's a fake troll account. Probably won't ever post again if you flag it.
Re:So who is required to pay... (Score:4, Funny)
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Please make this happen.
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Not a viable solution. If government wants it done, let government do it.
(Not that I think that's any better. It would probably be even worse.)
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So who is required to pay for the employees who will filter and handle the incoming torrent of bogus takedown requests?
There is old legalese from the Roman times saying "Iudex non calculat" [wikipedia.org]. It translates to "The judge doesn't calculate". ;)
Some people love the assumption that judges dont know anything about math!
Guess this applies here
No one. There won't be an incoming torrent. (Score:3)
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-... [economist.com]
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.
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Nobody. There will be no such employees. Registrars will simply take down any domain that gets a request against it, after the one doing it fills a form that he is really sure that the domain is doing something bad.
That, exactly, is the problem with these rulings. They ignore how the result will be applied in the real world.
Competitive advantage (Score:1)
Domain registrars outside of German (EU?) jurisdiction may have just gained a competitive advantage.
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I hole-hardedly agree... (Score:2, Funny)
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 s
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If there was only a way (Score:3)
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.
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It's called "hosts"
Hush! Or you will invoke... him!
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Virtual hosting means that URLs based on IP numbers cannot access many web pages. You can work around the issue by adding entries your you local hosts file. For example, if x.com and y.com are both hosted at 1.2.3.4, then http://1.2.3.4/ [1.2.3.4] can only access at most one of those two domains. Often the pages you get with the numeric address will be different from any of the DNS-based URLs, or brokenness will ensue, like redirect loops.
So In Germany (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You missed some steps there. Please at least read the blurb before constructing your straw man argument.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the logic (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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The difference is that in Europe jail is not punitive per se.
The objective is to reinstate these people into society, hence it makes sense to clear their record once they're a reinstated into society.
Does it *always* work? Certainly not but IMHO it's a way better system
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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.
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I fail to see the logic this court used.
That's because your example is an irrelevant strawman. The logic is actually quite consistent with other cases. Criminal cases in the courts where the government is unable to directly prosecute an individual due to being unresponsive often result in a secondary source of punishment for that person, e.g. seizing assets, freezing accounts, etc.
And yes you will find that if a motorist runs someone over and then doesn't respond to the police they will find their drivers license revoked.
Why stop there? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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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.
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The same reason that we don't shut the DMV when someone gets their drivers license revoked, and don't close down the Fed when some criminal's account gets frozen and assets seized.
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Interesting precedent (Score:2, Insightful)
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Oooo look at AC, all talking tough and shit, even at christmas. I'm scayered.
See what I did there? :)
Re: Interesting precedent (Score:2)
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Not only can, but now in Germany must do so if someone complains.
This can't possibly go wrong.
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No but your drug dealer is. You seem to be stuck on a trail of irrelevance. The ruling here is consistent in that it is directly related to the crime. Criminal finance results in assets being seized and accounts frozen at a bank, breaking the road rules and not responding to police results in license suspension.
These are all direct up the chain of providers, as is the Domain Registrar when the registered domain contains infringing content.
Now for your example one would need to say the ISP responsible for th
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Except this isn't just closing the account at the bank -- equivalent to taking the infringing pages offline. It's more akin to shutting down an entire branch because one criminal happened to store their proceeds in that bank.
And just like that analogy, the criminal will happily move to another bank (/registrar) and continue doing what they're doing while legitimate users get screwed. In fact happier as dns entries are far easier to replace than assets.
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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 governm
This will end DNS. (Score:1)
It doesn't matter that legal sites will continue to use DNS. A censorship resistant name space will emerge and it will be free, so eventually everybody will use it. Porn drives technology adoption and piracy drives the elimination of single-points-of-failure.
Private DNS or IP (Score:1)
Our courts support companies that take taxpayer funded research and lock it behind paywalls, stealing from the country, simply because they're getting paid.
Private DNS servers and IP addresses.
Copyright enforcement is everyone's job! (Score:2)
When did Western nations become so rabid about copyright enforcement that they are willing to extend liability so insanely? Individuals liable for millions of dollars of copyright infringements for a handful of songs. Linking to sites is becoming sources of liability, registering a domain is now a source of liability, merely making software that could possibly be used for enforcement is a source of liability, running a file-sharing web site is a source of liability, reverse-engineering and writing researc
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The streaming services issue has little to do with copyright, neither the law nor even abuses of the law. It's happening purely because Netflix started making a boatload of cash and streaming tech became easy/cheap/commonplace enough for any monkey with even a single popular title under their belt to decide they didn't want to share with Netflix anymore and start their own service.
Of course as you alluded to, this is not sustainable. Most people aren't going to be willing to pay for more than 2 or 3 servi
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Edit: "used for enforcement" should be "used for circumvention"
Das Internet funktioniert nicht so (Score:2)
Wieder ein Haufen alter Leute, ohne eine Ahnung davon zu haben, WIE etwas funktioniert und versuchen zu bestimmen, wie es funktionieren soll.
Wtf? (Score:1)
What does "can be required to..." even mean?
My understanding is that it's verbal or written sleight of hand similar to "you need to..." in other words, to add apparent weight to "I want you to..."