Sending Liability Up The Stack: Domain Registrars Potentially Liable For Infringement By End Users
from the tertiary-liability dept
For quite some time now, we've been concerned about the continued expansion of "secondary liability" concepts, adding more and more liability for copyright infringement to parties who are often far removed from any actual infringement. There are two major concerns with this. First, putting liability on one party for the actions of another just seems generally problematic. But, perhaps more importantly, when you put potential liability on an unrelated party, the end result is almost always excessive policing in a manner that hinders or entirely blocks perfectly legitimate activity and speech.That's why a recent court ruling in Germany is so problematic. It's the followup to an earlier ruling that found a domain registrar, Key-Systems, liable for actions done by the users of a torrent tracking site H33T. H33T just hosted the torrent (which, we should remind you, is not the actual infringing file), and some users used that tracker to torrent the album Blurred Lines. When H33T failed to respond to a takedown notice, Universal Music went after the registrar, and the court said it was Key-System's responsibility to stop the infringement. Of course, the only way for the registrar to do that is to yank the entire domain.
The case was appealed, but the appeals court upheld the lower court ruling. Even though the registrar pointed out (accurately) that it had no way of knowing if the torrent was actually infringing, the court said that the registrar was responsible for assuming it must be infringing once it had contacted the domain owners and not received a response. That's an interesting shifting of the burden of proof. The court also seems unconcerned that the only way the registrar can remedy the situation is to take everything down, saying that if the website didn't want this to happen it should have responded promptly to the takedown notices it had received.
Much of this seems to focus on assuming guilt unless one can prove innocence, and further believing that it's somehow "obvious" to recognize when someone is infringing on copyrights. As the Universal Music lawyer tells TorrentFreak in the link above, the company is quite excited about this new power, and will "have this in mind when looking at other domains."
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Filed Under: copyright, germany, liability, registrars, secondary liability, tertiary liability
Companies: h33t, key systems
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Shows how rotten is the garbage that run these organized crime branches. He's thrilled with the new censorship powers they got that bring down entirely legit content.
Germany has some rather twisted legal system eh?
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In other news Judge declares themselves stupid, 2nd judge admits to same stupidity
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Just get it over with.
EVERYONE would immediately go back to buying records and newspapers and going to the movies and watching only prime-time TV shows and listening only to network news like in the Good Old Days (tm)
/sarc
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Re: Just get it over with.
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Or perhaps it is time that Judges actually have to consider that just because a media company claims someone could do something doesn't mean it could be done as they wanted.
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Ripped off by an auto shop
Obviously, I was an idiot when I tried to resolve the issue directly with the auto shop. I should have sued the publisher of the phone book.
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Now couple this with Time Warner's actions with Hotfile where they had deletion authority for their own works but extended that to include FOSS and other programs they didn't own but didn't like. If by just claiming they can set up a domain removal, this is going to get nasty by the time it gets to the little people with an inclination to use this method.
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Dunning-Kruger
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the long arm of legal liability
Pirate Bay moneyman Carl Lundström was sentenced to prison a few years ago, despite being at least two degrees of separation removed from any actual infringers.
This puts pressure on everyone associated even remotely with copyright infringemnet. In addition to the torrent site operators, the hosting providers, payment processors, and now domain leasers are getting hit with the responsibility of policing sites that they have no involvement in or control over, other than the ability to pull the plug on some aspect of it.
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i sure hope there will be a higher appeal, otherwise, just as the entertainment industries want, the furthest away from a 'problem' is still going to get stung! i wonder how those same industries feel when they are held responsible when a manager fails to pay the artists, even though they have paid their bill?
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"When everyone else is the problem, then maybe the problem is you".
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What about---?
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Re: the long arm of legal liability
This puts pressure on everyone associated even remotely with copyright infringemnet. In addition to the torrent site operators, the hosting providers,
payment processors, and now domain leasers are getting hit with the responsibility of policing sites that they have no involvement in or control over,
other than the ability to pull the plug on some aspect of it.
Interesting and astute point.
Are there other areas of legal liability wherein the law treat the constellation X does something illegal, Y has some connection to X, and Y is ipso facto held responsible either for (a) Not terminating the relationship with X; (b) Not reporting X to the injured party; or (c) Not terminating the relationship with X prior to a court order.
It would seem that even telco providers are responsible on any of these grounds, and only are immune because there is a specific statutory safe harbor for service providers.
What about an administrator of a shared network allowing every guest user to establish an encrypted connection to the internet?
If the connection is encrypted, the administrator has no chance to verify if the contents transmitted by one user of the network violates copyright.
The only recourse seems to be cutting off the suspected user, but what if the user denies the allegation?
A legal regime under which a copyright holder may shoot first and ask questions later would permit anyone to shutdown any networked system pending a judicial ruling.
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