Cdn Fed Court Says No Copyright Infringement For Linking, Posting Several Paragraphs from Article. The Federal Court of Canada has issued an important decision involving copyright and posting content online.
The case involves a lawsuit launched by Richard Warman and the National Post against Mark and Constance Fournier, who run the FreeDominion website. Warman and the National Post sued the site over the appearance of two articles and an inline link to photograph that appeared on the forum. The court dismissed all three claims. While the first claim (Warman's article) was dismissed on the basis that it took too long to file the lawsuit, the legal analysis on the National Post claim involving an article by Jonathan Kay assesses the copyright implications of posting several paragraphs from an article online. In this case, the article was 11 paragraphs long.
The court's discussion is important for several reasons. The third claim involved a link to a photograph posted on the photographer's site. UK Court Finds That Simply Linking To Infringing Videos Is Not Infringing. We've seen more than a few lawsuits over the years by the entertainment industry against various sites that merely link to infringing content.
The entertainment industry likes to make the claim that this is inducing infringement, but if you're just pointing to a bunch of YouTube videos, it's difficult to see how that should be considered infringement at all. In one such case, over in the UK, a site called tv-links.co.uk, after years battling this in court, was found not to have infringed on the copyrights of movie studios. The case was brought by FACT, the "Federation Against Copyright Theft," but had little evidence of any actual infringement being done by the site, who merely linked to videos found on YouTube, Veoh, DailyMotion and other sites. FACT originally claimed that the site "facilitated" copyright infringement on the internet, despite that not being a part of UK law.
Google takes down 1.2 million search links a month over piracy, copyright issues. Google today released a new picture of the millions of links it scrubs from its search results in response to requests from Microsoft, movie studios and other content owners.
In a reflection of the evolving nature of anti-piracy enforcement, the company revealed that it takes down 250,000 search links each week over copyright concerns, a figure that exceeds the total number it removed in all of 2009. The data arrived today as a new section in Google’s Transparency Report, a set of findings that show how governments — and now private actors — are removing pages from the internet. Google’s senior copyright counsel, Fred von Lohmann, stressed in an interview that the vast majority of the takedown requests are legitimate and come in response to sites offering unauthorized copies of software, entertainment or pornography.
Here is a screenshot from the Transparency Report that shows who is ordering the take downs and which websites most commonly host unauthorized content: Odd That Microsoft Demands Google Take Down Links That Remain In Bing. We just wrote about Google's very cool, new copyright transparency tool, which lets you dig into the details of all the search takedowns that Google gets.
As people start to play around with the site, some interesting things are coming to light. Lots of people noticed that the number one copyright holder requesting takedowns from Google search was... Microsoft. While some have suggested this is an attempt by a competitor to worsen Google's search rankings, that's difficult to believe for a variety of reasons. If Microsoft were issuing bogus takedowns, that would certainly come to light pretty quickly. However, what is interesting is that you can use the new system to play around and notice that Microsoft doesn't always seem to take down from its search engine, Bing, the same links that it orders Google to takedown.
Now, if you take that URL and put it into Google and Bing, you get two very different responses. Okay. Whoops!