4 ms·
How can this work? A link is just a reference to a mutable destination and there's no way to guarantee that what's pointed at stays legal after the link was put
by cm3 10y ago
How can this work? A link is just a reference to a mutable destination and there's no way to guarantee that what's pointed at stays legal after the link was put up. It can change at any time and turn into something illegal, even though the original content was not.
I do get the intent here, but it absolutely misses the point.
Edit: The ruling acknowledges the target is mutable, but it also says that the poster of a link on a page that's for-profit must check the target content. However, I cannot find anything how one should prove it was legal at time of linking. The only sensible thing I can find is that once notified a link has to be taken down. Did I miss something?
- kyriakos 10y agoIn absolute terms your argument is valid but I doubt they will use it against a situation where a single link got hijacked. Its more to have the legal framework to go after sites who systematically (and intentionally) link to pirated content.
- forgetsusername 10y ago>but I doubt they will use it against a situation Until that one case where they do, and you're on the other end of it. Hoping for a sympathetic reading of the law is not recommended.
- seszett 10y agoHave you read the decision[0] though? It specifically addresses this. > it is to be determined whether those links are provided without the pursuit of financial gain by a person who did not know or could not reasonably have known the illegal nature of the publication of those works on that other website or whether, on the contrary, those links are provided for such a purpose, a situation in which that knowledge must be presumed. [0]http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=183124&pageIndex=0&doclang=en&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=755998 http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- morganvachon 10y agoI realize this is the EU, but if this ruling were to happen in the US, sites like cracked.com who link to copyright-encumbered content all the time (mostly Youtube clips of movies and TV shows, often produced by highly litigious houses like Disney/Marvel Studios) and make a ton of money from ads, would quickly be sued out of existence.
- seszett 10y agoWould that be a bad thing though? Those websites are purposefully acting in a way that doesn't respect the copyright of the owner of the content they want to show. That they do this through a third-party host shouldn't be that important.
- shiven 10y agoYes. As a strong opinion holder in the copyleft philosophy of any and all content, I feel such sites have a right to exist and profit from content as much as the copyright holders (who are not necessarily the creators of said content). But hey, this is just the opinion of some random dude on the Internet.
- 10y ago
- icebraining 10y agoMens rea.
- ramblenode 10y agoThis was exactly my thought. It's also possible to create new URLs leading to the same resource through e.g. a link shortener like Bitly or a proxy service. Pushing this further, would something that is not itself a URL but from which the URL could be recovered, e.g. a hash of the URL, be in violation? Is it transitive, such that a URL from one page linking to another page with the original offending link is also in violation? I'm not a lawyer but this ruling seems to open the floodgates.