The 90s are back! Clinton is running for president, and the legality hyperlinks are up for debate again.
In 1999, a similar lawsuit was brought up against 2600 Magazine over the issue of linking to source code that could have the potential to violate copyright:
I think you are reading the wrong statistics. What has stagnated in Belgium since 2003 is the percentage of broadband connections that are ADSL. Between 2003 and 2008 alone broadband penetration more than doubled.
Note the word 'advised'. This is a legal opinion from an important individual who looks at the case and tells the court what he thinks. But (i) the court can ignore it or look at the case themselves and make their own opinion; and (ii) any ruling they do make does not bind any EU government to implement it (though it should strongly decisions in EU countries). It's like asking your mechanic friend what he thinks of the car you've got lined up to buy.
As the CJEU press release states:
> NOTE: The Advocate General’s Opinion is not binding on the Court of Justice. It is the role of the Advocates General to propose to the Court, in complete independence, a legal solution to the cases for which they are responsible. The Judges of the Court are now beginning their deliberations in this case. Judgment will be given at a later date.
FWIW my wife puts the odds of victory on this at something like 70% at this point. She's a director at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, working on freedom of expression.
You're correct, but the practice is that the advice of the Advocate General is followed by the Court of Justice. So normally it's just a matter of time.
The caption is kind of amusing with it's literal-ness and complete irrelevance to the story:
> People are silhouetted as they pose with laptops in front of a screen projected with binary code and a Central Inteligence Agency (CIA) emblem, in this picture illustration taken in Zenica October 29, 2014.
It is; I think it may have been intended as alt-text rather than a caption. It's precisely the sort of description that you'd give to a blind person to describe "here's what this image is, in case you can't see it."
I've used mine in a similar fashion on many occasions. However, I have more of a death-grip on it, where I rest it over my forearm horizontally, and grab the right side of the base with my left hand.
I wonder how this would have affected the UK TVShack.net case [0]. Richard O'Dwyer was subjected to the absolutely awful UK-US extradition agreements over linking to copyrighted content.
Of course, an opinion that hyperlinks aren't currently copyright infringement by themselves could be seen by some as evidence that a new law is actually necessary.
Seems absurd to legislate this when there's a simple technical solution. If you don't want to allow "deep links" on a public web site, simply block any request where the HTTP referrer isn't from your domain (or from domains whose owners have paid you for linking rights, if you can find anyone inclined to do so.) You could go even further by encoding a base64-encoded expiration date + HMAC into the URL, so that your deep URLs can't be saved at all.
I think doing either of these things is silly - why even run a public web site if you're going to do this? But it's their site, and their right to make bad decisions with it.
If a site owner chooses not to do this, it's safe to assume they intended to allow deep links, since links are a fundamental, well-known feature of the medium they chose to use.
I don't think that's what this is about. It's about linking to content that violates copyright laws, e.g. running a torrent tracker.
> The case arose in the Netherlands where the GeenStijl website had provided a link to an Australian site showing pictures of a Dutch celebrity taken by Playboy magazine. The Australian site did not have Playboy's consent to do so.
If a site owner chooses not to do this, it's safe to assume they intended to allow deep links, [..]
Or it could mean that the site owner doesn't have the technical expertise to block deep links in the manner you describe. I agree that it's silly to block deep linking but there are people that want to do so and a lot of those people don't know how (other than not publishing those links).
The correct answer is to hire the expertise to get it done. Can't blame the neighbors for looking at your lawn if setting up a high fence is easy and you chose not to.
If the behavior that somebody finds to be unwanted is trivial to protect yourself from, then only in very special circumstances it should possible to legally ban it. The easier the defense is, the higher the bar for getting a ban through. (Besides the usual need to prove harm.)
Because the law should only get involved when you need a strong third party to get involved for protection, preserving order and to arbitrate.
Legality aside, it just seems counter intuitive in the first place.
If you're putting content on a publicly facing server with web routes open to all (i.e. walking nude in public), you shouldn't be surprised when people look.
The expiration date+HMAC is still an option. Plus, the number of users blocking referrer headers is probably small enough that a site owner doing this wouldn't care. And browsers dropping the header from HTTPS -> HTTP isn't an issue if you only want to allow access from your own domain. (If you want to authorize third-party sites that use HTTPS, you'd just have to use HTTPS yourself.)
100K users of a single extension for a single browser. I'll leave it to you to get the numbers for all other extensions for all other browsers. And don't forget that uBlock can do this as well.
They're not as popular as they used to be, but many popular security packages (ie Norton Internet Security I believe) also blank all outgoing referrers.
> If a site owner chooses not to do this, it's safe to assume they intended to allow deep links
That's not how the law works, though; you don't have to make it impossible for someone to infringe on your intellectual property for it to have protection.
That's not to argue that there is any IP law protection here regardless.
I saw a video from EU parliament where Gunther Oettinger urged that paper pritning news industry will die thanks to hyperlinking and so we, the EU, must do something about it (ratify this law). I think it's pretty clear where his second wage is coming from. Or he's absolutely stupid and doesn't have a clue about economy and prosperity.
> I think it's pretty clear where his second wage is coming from. Or he's absolutely stupid and doesn't have a clue about economy and prosperity.
Look into his relationship with lobbies and consumer rights' organisations some time. Also, his speech about the Taliban-like evils of net neutrality (yes, really).
Ah yes, Oettigner, EU commissioner for digital economy and society, no less. From the country that brought you greatest hits like "Leistungsschutzrecht".
It's the latter. The specific case that prompted this general inquiry was of an Australian website posting a copyright infringing photo, and a Dutch website linking to that photo. Assuming it's given that the Australian site is infringing copyright, the question being considered is: does the Dutch site also then infringe the copyright?
If the court rules that yes, the Dutch site also infringes copyright, it basically breaks how the internet works. You are liable for copyright infringement on any content linked to from your site. Imagine a forum, for instance..
>"Hyperlinks which lead, even directly, to protected works are not 'making them available' to the public when they are already freely accessible on another website, and only serve to facilitate their discovery," the opinion said.
First case seems to be fine as well. Unless of course you're hosting the images yourself, then you need to get permission.
It sounded to me like the latter as well. I think the Advocate General is saying you can't ban hyperlinks unless they are the only way to access a copyrighted work.
As an example, I would think a link that allowed someone to get around the requirements to login to view something (maybe username/password as query parameters or something?) would be considered illegal.
There was also the comment about being freely available already. So a page behind username / password would not be freely available and you would be breaking the law.
Now, if a user on a private page, marked something as public, but did not publish the link, then it would be legal as you could argue that its freely available.*
I read it more that if the GreenStijl website which was in the EU jurisdiction was posting the links to the pages hosted on a computer within another jurisdiction, but that the pages were not generally available (ie they weren't being hosted on an actual website where they were part of that that website) then GreenStijl would be liable for copyright infringement because the only way to access the published content would be through them.
so GreenStijl can't just host the pages anonymously on mega.com and link to them.. in that case they would deemed to be part of their website.
In Spain they illegalised links to infringing content (mostly movie/music downloads) by creating a "Commission of experts" which would rule on takedowns. The reason for this, of course, is that judges and courts were deeming hyperlinks were legal.
If you can read Spanish, google "Sinde-Wert jueces". This one is good: http://www.eldiario.es/zonacritica/ComisionSinde-jueces_6_16... (its author is David Bravo, a copyright lawyer who's recently been elected to Spanish Parliament, and one of the most vocal personalities on copyright in Spain).
While I am not a lawyer, I suspect that a reasonable person would say that encoding the content in a string turns the link into the content rather than leading one to the content.
This was my first thought, however there was this at the bottom of the article:
The advocate general added that this also depended on whether the link was indispensable in making the photos available, a matter which he referred back to the local Dutch court.
I believe the argument is that while The Pirate Bay only links to copyrighted content, they are integral to making that content available (since very few sites have these link listings).
If widely available search engines indexed magnet links then I think TPB would be legal under this opinion.
There are widely available search engines indexing magnet links; it's just that they're all other torrent sites. Each individual site isn't integral to making that content available, but the class "torrent site", taken as a whole, may be. I'm not sure how the interpretation would work here - "would be integral if it were the only extant illegal source"?
So, if Google is the only site that has spidered my content and my content is infringing then Google is also infringing?
Obviously Google are too rich for the argument to work against them, but say a popular blogger finds a website with little traffic and some great content and links to it; they then would seemingly become responsible for the original site's infringement?
One can see why the media lobby would want to leave in the option to declare TPB illegal but it seems an unworkable reservation if we're to hold to the rule of law. Kinda like (stealing someone else's analogy up-thread) if you charge someone with public indecency for pointing out there was a person being indecent - inappropriate nudity, say - if not many people had noticed the indecency prior to the declaration. Seems pretty mad to me.
I'm not sure TPB is what they're thinking about. I think it's closing the loophole where EU sites could host all their infringing content under another jurisdiction which doesn't care about copyright, and then just linking to it.
> they are integral to making that content available (since very few sites have these link listings).
What is "very few" in your opinion? There are dozens, even hundreds of torrent sites out there. They often also meta-index data from each other, serving as a sort of ad hoc replication.
It was morally always "legal". The paid inquisition may have made it illegal (and looks imoral), but things should get back to the rightful state of legality sometime in the future.
Given the legal uncertainty introduced by the new Spanish law, I think that is not worth the risk to put links to spanish webs anymore in the 90% of the cases. Definitely, not more free linking to news on online journals related with AEDE by now.
Unless absolutely necessary, I now give just a couple of clues and let people find the page for themselves in google if they want. Stupid measures for stupid times...
Things like this are why I often wonder why people hail court verdicts so much. We've clearly established that courts are rarely even close to logically consistent, yet a court ruling in favor of or against an issue being discussed is often hailed as absolute truth.
I don't understand how a link could ever be judged to infringe copyright. No copy is made, any more than if I tell my friends, in person, to go and check out the cool, copyright-infringing photo that one of us have.
No, not hotlinking. I don't think hotlinking inherently could break a law, I think that would require some understanding that the host provides the content for one particular use and any other use would be a violation. There probably are sites with license agreements/terms of service that state as much in which case hotlinking would be breaking the contract. If ad blocking were illegal, it would be for the same reason.
Hotlinking could be involved in criminal or civil actions, e.g. used to perpetrate fraud or used maliciously (intended to use up host's resources or even DDOS).
I'm no lawyer, but from an end user's perspective if you hotlinked an unauthorized image instead of linking to a page containing the image, then you aren't just "pointing" to the image anymore, you're practically displaying the image on your website.
The content you have merely contains a link to the provided resource. The user can fetch your page without violating the law, the user can also legally fetch the image from the owner. So neither you nor your user have committed a crime.
You could try to argue that the user requires a license to combine the 2 in ways not considered by you however this has several problems.
- Its laughably unenforceable
- In the us it would probably be fair use
- It would make literally the entire internet illegal
- It would make adblocking on your end illegal
- It would make you a world wide source of negativity and scorn.
Basically there is a technical solution to most hotlinking issues and every imaginable legal solution would be a cure worse than the disease.
Thank you for a very relevant link, yet (as legal things go) this case has its special setting. They were using thumbnails, and they were not pretending or that the image belonged to them or their own content.
If I write a news article, and I hotlink in an illustration with no credit or comment, that still seems problematic.
I'm not sure the distintion is relevant. In the decision[1] which affirmed the lower court's, the judges applied the "server test"; essentially, they've said it's never copyright infringement if you don't actually distribute it yourself, but merely tell the browser where it can get the image.
This excerpt is particularly relevant:
Perfect 10 argues that Google displays a copy of the full-
size images by framing the full-size images, which gives the
impression that Google is showing the image within a single
Google webpage. While in-line linking and framing may
cause some computer users to believe they are viewing a sin-
gle Google webpage, the Copyright Act, unlike the Trade-
mark Act, does not protect a copyright holder against acts that
cause consumer confusion.
This is at least reassuring. I don't think it's a big leap from saying that a link to a site with infringing content is itself an infringing act to saying a link to a site that links to a site [... etc] is itself infringing.
So does such an advise also include things like magnet links, which do not include the content, or its location, but instead a description of the content by means of a hash or checksum?
In 1999, a similar lawsuit was brought up against 2600 Magazine over the issue of linking to source code that could have the potential to violate copyright:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v...
http://www.cnn.com/1999/TECH/ptech/12/28/dvd.crack/