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The case mentioned "R v Rock & Overton at the Crown Court in Gloucester (T20097013)" (http://www.obs.coe.int/oea_publ/legal/reginavsrockoverton.pdf http://www.o
by lucaspiller 15y ago
The case mentioned "R v Rock & Overton at the Crown Court in Gloucester (T20097013)" (http://www.obs.coe.int/oea_publ/legal/reginavsrockoverton.pdf http://www.obs.coe.int/oea_publ/legal/reginavsrockoverton.pd...) is interesting. It discusses the site TV Links which did exactly the same as TV Shack, the only difference however appears to be that TV Links attempted to remove any links reported as copyright infringing (a la DMCA protection). A few interesting snippets:
"In summary Mr Bridge contented that the prosecution of the defendants amounted to a breach of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Mr Overton's right to freedom of speech. He said that The Guardian newspaper had carried an article dated 24th February 2007 describing TV-Links in detail. TV-Links did no more than any other TV listings site or indeed The Guardian newspaper. TV-Links merely expressed the fact that films could be accessed on other host sites."
"It was argued that TV-Links was in a similar position to Google or YouTube in that all of the material could be accessed by persons who used TV-Links could also be accessed through their use of those sites as well. ... The essential difference between TV-Links and sites that directly provide pirated material in breach of copyright (it was not suggested that Google or YouTube fall into this category) is that those other sites store the illegal material and make it available to users of the site. TV-Links did not store any such material. It was simply a sign post pointing the way to where such material could be accessed by those members of the public who chose to do so."
"The prosecutor in this case, he said, had a cast iron case against the viewers of the material accessed by the use of the TV-Links site and against the broadcasters of that material. He did not however have a case against the middle man, namely the defendants and who had not made available this material. The defendants themselves were not making available the copyright material."