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Comment by jbuzbee | Hacker News Reader

Techdirt has a good writeup on the new ruling. One of the good points made on Techdirt, is regarding search engines which are obviously for-profit. How in the world would Google keep from linking to material which is violating someone's copyright?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160908/11305735465/terri...

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simple: google has no idea what it indexes. Please read the full ruling, which explains this only applies to those who willingly and intentionally link to content they _know_ is illegal, _and_ do so for monetary gain. Which is perfectly reasonable. The article posted to HN is pretty much fear-mongering for te purpose of getting some clicks.

It's not that easy. What if the MPAA, Playboy, etc. send file filenames to Google and say "It's illegal to link to this file and if you do so, you are willingly and intentionally violating our copyright" Is that really what we want? It's a slippery slope when courts make these rulings without really understanding the impacts.

"What if?" That's already what happens. Google puts up a notice that some results have been omitted due to DMCA requests and links a copy of the requests.

It is not true that the ruling says that "this only applies to those who willingly and intentionally link to content they _know_ is illegal, _and_ do so for monetary gain." The ruling explicitly states that the first condition is sufficient to constitute a 'communication to the public' and that, when determining whether posting a link to such content constitutes a 'communication to the public', we must assume that the second condition implies the first condition. This last bit is in the ruling itself. In its consideration of the questions referred, the court qualifies a similar statement with "in so far as that rebuttable presumption is not rebutted", which may at least help those who can disprove that presumption.

Two relevant portions of the court's judgment (my emphasis added to the latter):

> In contrast, where it is established that such a person knew or ought to have known that the hyperlink he posted provides access to a work illegally placed on the internet, for example owing to the fact that he was notified thereof by the copyright holders, it is necessary to consider that the provision of that link constitutes a ‘communication to the public’ within the meaning of Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29.

> or whether, on the contrary, those links are provided for such a purpose, _a situation in which that knowledge must be presumed_.

>google has no idea what it indexes.

In the same way a drug dealer has no idea what's in his stash; they know exactly the sort of thing in there, roughly how much of it is there but not the very specific details.

If you say that Google has no idea what it indexes then we can say that the creator of Silk Road had no idea what was sold there, he just made a clone of ebay. Well in the end everything depends on the judge's interpretation of the law. Especially when it allows different interpretations.

In fact google just doesn't want to moderate illegal content. It doesn't even remove the websites with infringing material, only single links.

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