EU Court Of Justice: Just Viewing Stuff Online Isn't Infringing On Copyright

from the about-time dept

It's kind of ridiculous that it's taken this long, but the EU Court of Justice has now made it clear that viewing stuff that is legally on the internet is not copyright infringement. We had written about this case a few months back, as an offshoot of the various cases against clipping service/aggregator Meltwater. This specific dispute involves the Newspaper Licensing Agency's (NLA) continuing argument with the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), and NLA's absolutely insane assertion that on-screen and cached copies of articles online was copyright infringement unless there was a license. As we noted last year, the UK Supreme Court agreed that this was nutty, but asked the EU Court of Justice to weigh in to be sure.

And, thankfully, on this one the EUCJ got it right, saying that on-screen and cached copies don't require a special license:

Article 5 of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society must be interpreted as meaning that the copies on the user’s computer screen and the copies in the internet ‘cache’ of that computer’s hard disk, made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website, satisfy the conditions that those copies must be temporary, that they must be transient or incidental in nature and that they must constitute an integral and essential part of a technological process, as well as the conditions laid down in Article 5(5) of that directive, and that they may therefore be made without the authorisation of the copyright holders.

This is kind of important, because if the ruling had gone the other way, basically all of the internet would be infringing, and any time people loaded up anything in their web browsers, they'd likely be infringing. Kudos to the EUCJ for getting it right, but it's kind of crazy that we had to wait until now to make that clear...

Filed Under: cache, clipping, copyright, eu court of justice, eucj, europe, incidental copies, the web, transient copies, viewing
Companies: meltwater, nla, prca

The Web Is In The Public Domain... But The Document That Put It There Is Locked Up By Copyright

from the copyright-everything dept

We've pointed out before how grateful we are that Tim Berners-Lee didn't look to patent the World Wide Web in the early days, because it's unlikely it would have developed as it did if he had. Over at CERN, where Berners-Lee worked at the time, they have an archive in which they show "the document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain on 30 April 1993." Indeed, it is a great thing that CERN quickly and clearly put the main concepts behind the web into the public domain. But, as David Sleight points out it does seem rather ridiculously ironic, that in order to view the documents that "put the web into the public domain," you have to agree to a copyright notice from CERN: Technically, CERN is probably correct. While it put the concepts that underlie the web into the public domain, the specific images and documents are still covered by copyright. Furthermore, it's quite likely that the "conditions of use ©" notice are just standard artifacts on basically every CERN document or image. However, it still highlights how we live in a world today where people are constantly in a default mode of "protect" everything and "lock up" everything, even in cases where it makes absolutely no sense. Does this document need copyright? Obviously not. Is there any purpose at all in having it under copyright? Not at all. And yet, it is. And that's a sad statement on the nature of copyright today.

Filed Under: cern, copyright, intellectual property, public domain, the web, tim berners-lee, world wide web

On The Web's 25th Anniversary, Berners-Lee Calls For A Bill of Rights For Online Users

from the prising-the-keyboards-from-our-cold,-dead-fingers dept

Exactly 25 years ago, a British engineer working at the European nuclear research center CERN wrote a paper entitled "Information Management: A Proposal." It had a very specific purpose:

This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.

Things have moved on somewhat, and so has the author of that proposal, Tim Berners-Lee -- now Sir Tim Berners-Lee -- who has used the occasion of the Web's 25th anniversary to make a call for global action to defend users of the technology he created all those years ago:

The inventor of the world wide web believes an online "Magna Carta" is needed to protect and enshrine the independence of the medium he created and the rights of its users worldwide.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Guardian the web had come under increasing attack from governments and corporate influence and that new rules were needed to protect the "open, neutral" system.

Speaking exactly 25 years after he wrote the first draft of the first proposal for what would become the world wide web, the computer scientist said: "We need a global constitution -- a bill of rights."

As we reported last year, Berners-Lee has been outspoken in his criticism of the US and UK governments for their unjustified and disproportionate spying activities, something he is still concerned about:

In the light of what has emerged, he said, people were looking for an overhaul of how the security services were managed.

So it's no surprise that at the heart of his new initiative lies an attempt to protect some of the areas that have been harmed by massive surveillance programs and online business models based on gathering and exploiting users' personal data:

Principles of privacy, free speech and responsible anonymity would be explored in the Magna Carta scheme. "These issues have crept up on us," Berners-Lee said. "Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years."

He hopes to do that as part of a broader "Web We Want" campaign:

calling on people around the world to stand up for their right to a free, open and truly global Internet. The first step: Drafting an Internet Users Bill of Rights for every country, proposing it to governments and kickstarting the change we need.

Alongside these core areas, there are some specific issues he would like to see addressed:

We also need to revisit a lot of legal structure, copyright law -- the laws that put people in jail which have been largely set up to protect the movie producers &... None of this has been set up to preserve the day to day discourse between individuals and the day to day democracy that we need to run the country," he said.

Berners-Lee also spoke out strongly in favour of changing a key and controversial element of internet governance that would remove a small but symbolic piece of US control. The US has clung on to the Iana contract, which controls the dominant database of all domain names, but has faced increased pressure post-Snowden.

Although that last point is likely to be resisted, many will doubtlessly support the broader aims of his high-profile attempt to take the Web back to the roots planted 25 years ago:

Rejecting the idea that government and commercial control of such a powerful medium was inevitable, Berners-Lee said it would be impossible: "Not until they prise the keyboards from our cold, dead fingers."

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Filed Under: bill of rights, magna carta, the web, tim berners-lee, www