UK Supreme Court Says Unauthorized Browsing Of Copyright Material Online Is OK, But Asks European Court Of Justice Just In Case
from the are-we-there-yet? dept
The lawsuits brought against the media monitoring firm Meltwater in both the US and the UK have not turned out too well for the company so far. In the US, the district court handed down a summary judgment against Meltwater, while in the UK, two courts came to a particularly worrying conclusion: that simply viewing copyright material online without a license amounted to infringement.
Fortunately, this judgment was appealed to the UK Supreme Court, which has just published its ruling. The judges recognized that the central issue is whether the temporary copies held on a computer in its memory cache, which are necessary to view a document stored on the Web, are covered by a clause in UK and European law that exempts temporary copies from needing a license provided certain conditions are met. In the judges' view, copies held purely for browsing were indeed covered, provided they were not saved or printed out. Here's why that is crucial:
if it is an infringement merely to view copyright material, without downloading or printing out, then those who browse the internet are likely unintentionally to incur civil liability, at least in principle, by merely coming upon a web-page containing copyright material in the course of browsing. This seems an unacceptable result, which would make infringers of many millions of ordinary users of the internet across the EU who use browsers and search engines for private as well as commercial purposes.
That's obviously just common sense -- sadly, a rare commodity when it comes to copyright in the online world. However, the UK Supreme Court has asked the European Court of Justice to offer its own, definitive, ruling so as to settle the law for the whole of Europe. As the judge writing the verdict noted:
I recognise the issue has a transnational dimension and that the application of copyright law to internet use has important implications for many millions of people across the EU making use of what has become a basic technical facility. These considerations make it desirable that any decision on the point should be referred to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling, so that the critical point may be resolved in a manner which will apply uniformly across the European Union.
Of course, the legal status of temporary copies is a crucial question elsewhere, too. For example, in her speech at Columbia University back in March, Copyright Register Maria Pallante spoke of "the confusion over incidental copies", which needed sorting out. More worryingly, one relatively recent leak of the TPP draft seemed to indicate that it would require all temporary copies to be regulated. The fact that we are still having this discussion about a technological necessity some twenty years after the Web was invented, shows just how out of touch with modern reality copyright law remains.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: browsing, copyright infringement, eucj, incidental copies, temporary copies, uk
Companies: ap, meltwater
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"The fact that we are still having this discussion about a technological necessity some twenty years after the Web was invented, shows just how out of touch with modern reality copyright law remains."
Rome wasn't built in a day
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
48 Hrs to build a hotel
Times change.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
And even after the frame was erected, they still didn't have the exterior or the interior put together.
Not quite the same as "build a hotel in 48 hours." Still pretty impressive, though.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Yeah, but folks like Glyn and Mike find it completely unacceptable that their personal "final solution" is not immediately adopted by everyone. They could never admit that it's an evolutionary thing that doesn't move as fast as electrons.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
If you can find it, you can see it. no authorization needed.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
If you can find it, it's because the person who put it there made it available to you, and hence gave their implicit permission for you to browse (i.e. download) it. Of course it's always possible that that permission wasn't theirs to give, but there doesn't seem to be any realistic way for you to determine that.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Given that arrangements of public domain works are subject to copyright, every page on the web is covered by copyright. Presumably the quote should refer to material published on the Internet without permission.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Only creative arrangements, which are actually fairly rare if they're meant to be useful in some way, rather than merely arbitrary. Creatively selecting works is a lot easier than creatively arranging them.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"media monitoring"? What the hell euphemism is that?
Anyhoo, this part is stupid: "those who browse the internet are likely unintentionally to incur civil liability, at least in principle, by merely coming upon a web-page containing copyright material in the course of browsing" -- No, somehow that's been flipped from the web-site operator being held responsible for what's on the site to those merely browsing, perhaps re-directed by one of the many private DNS boxes. If were actually any common sense applied, we wouldn't be seeing this raised.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: "media monitoring"? What the hell euphemism is that?
It's amazing how often you buy into the claims and beliefs from corperation heads while claiming to be anti big business
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
And it was the collecting society for UK newspapers behind this (the kind of people who want Google to pay them for indexing their websites etc.).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Licensing of ephemeral copies
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Licensing of ephemeral copies
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Did you read this?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Did you read this?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Did you read this?
(a) by posting the comment, you gave an implied, worldwide, royalty-free licence to anyone to copy it for their own personal use, connected with browsing this site (possibly a broad one, that would have to be argued before a court);
(b) additionally or alternatively, viewing the comment is not an infringement in the copyright as it falls within the exceptions of fair dealing for criticism and review, and/or private study;
(c) additionally or alternatively, the comment lacks sufficient originality to be protected as a literary work, and thus is not covered by copyright,
(d) finally, even if a claim for copyright infringement were to be successful, any damages awarded (based either on a "reasonable royalty rate" or "actual loss suffered") would be negligible, and below the de minimis threshold.
So there...
[Also, please be aware that dishonestly making a false representation ("you owe me money") intending to make a profit by it (or cause a loss) is a criminal offence in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, under s2 Fraud Act 2006.]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Wasn't this covered in 2003?
Oh, geez. Even I can comprehend the InfoSoc Directive better than that, and I'm (technically) retarded!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]