Twitter Suspends Accounts For 'Infringement' Despite Not Linking To Any Infringing Works

from the getting-further-and-further-away dept

It's already troubling enough to many people that merely linking to some content can make you subject to a DMCA takedown notice. Merely linking to content that others may have uploaded or hosted doesn't seem to fall into any of the exclusive rights covered by copyright law. But now it appears things are going even further, and Twitter is helping, for reasons that make no sense. After a Spanish film distributor sent copyright takedown notices to Twitter about the accounts of Elite Torrents and Bajui, both accounts were shut down.

Now, EliteTorrents is a torrent tracker site and Bajui is a linking site. And it's quite reasonable to argue that both sites enable a fair amount of copyright infringement. No one is arguing that point (though some would reasonably point out that neither site hosts or copies any infringing content themselves, leading back to that question of what rights are being violated by linking). However, even leaving that aside, the real concern here is that the tweets in question, which resulted in the takedown notices, didn't even link to any content. They did post film title names and a screenshot of the movie poster: The clear implication here, of course, is that you could access a copy of that movie from the site. And it's quite likely that downloading the film via those sites would be infringing. But are the tweets alone infringement themselves? That seems like a much bigger stretch. How far would it go? Would it be infringing if I told you that you might be able to find a certain film if you went to a certain site? At some point, that's just outlawing speech.

Now, I'm sure some will argue that it doesn't matter. What these two sites are doing involves infringement, and thus any and all punishment, including losing their Twitter accounts is fine. But we do have limits for a reason. Even if you think that EliteTorrernts and Bajui are breaking the law, does that automatically justify any and all punishment? If someone jaywalks, is it okay for them to be thrown in prison for ten years "because they broke the law." That's not how this works. Here, it's not at all clear how these tweets violated copyright law in any way, and yet Twitter took the accounts down for copyright infringement. Does that mean that Twitter will now make judgments about your off Twitter activity to determine if you deserve a Twitter account? Doesn't that ring a lot of alarm bells?

Filed Under: copyright, infringement, linking, talking about
Companies: bajui, elitetorrents, twitter