We object to the Newspaper Licensing Agency's terms | Hacker News Reader

We object to the Newspaper Licensing Agency's terms

cutbot.net

71 pointsColinWright33 comments

First comment: "Interesting. These would be the same newspapers that once quoted my blog, without warning. This caused a traffic spike, and a hit to my hosting bill. I look forward to my forthcoming claim against The Times."

Because of course, it's not that the newspapers think any view of a webpage or usage of a headline is infringing, oh no. They just want this rule to apply to Their Stuff, which is Worth Protecting. Not to Your Stuff.

My favorite such case was when the Belgian newspapers sued Google for linking to their sites, and then when Google stopped doing it because they actually won that lawsuit, they came back begging to Google to include them again, once their traffic dropped significantly.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110718/16394915157/belgia...

There was also this case reported by TorrentFreak (sorry couldn't find the link). Where this guy from a record label was making a huge deal about one of the bands he managed was being pirated to death. The band only had sold like 200 copies total, but according to his research, that same band had being downloaded illegally over 200k times. TorrentFreak dug into it, and after many emails and a long slapfight between TorrentFreak and the record guy. They found out that he was actually being fooled by those fake download scams. Where the website will say that anything you search for have thousands of downloads, just to make you download a malware instead. The record label refused to admit the mistake, went crazy in their own blog accusing TorrentFreak of being the root of all evil. But then when they got hold of the actual band member. They found they were extremely disappointed to find out the downloads were fake. For a few days this completely unknown band thought they were actually famous.

It really disappoints me that Google would relist those sites. I would have demanded the money spent in court fees as payment for relisting, and if they didn't want to pay it... Google's under no obligation to list any site.

While it's fun to be vindictive, google surely made money by listing ads for those sites, and was probably happy to put them back and get the ad revenue again.

The article and the headline do not mention it, but FYI, this takes place in the United Kingdom.

More specifically, it takes place in Scotland.

Which has a very different legal system from England and Wales (or anywhere else, for that matter). Primary legislation from 1707 through 2000 was enacted in Parliament in London, but the judicial system itself is based on Roman law rather than Common Law or the Napoleonic Continental System.

This affects me (I'm in Edinburgh and so is my colo server). You, whoever you are, are probably safe.

Charlie, while both you and Cutbot are in Scotland, this is actually a UK issue. First, copyright is an issue reserved to Westminster. Second, the High Court (and Court of Appeal) ruled that normal web browsing is a potentially infringing activity. In the case of newspaper content, the NLA for the rights-holders now require commercial users to obtain a licence — initially for those receiving briefings from monitoring firms, but the ruling covers all commercial use, which includes simply visiting a relevant web page while at even a charitable place of work.

Also, please note that this isn’t about the location of colo servers: the law as interpreted by the courts concerns viewing a web page while in the UK.

The court rulings in question are:

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2010/3099.html http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2011/890.html

Disclosure: I’m one of the founders of Cutbot.

If it's based on the Roman Law, then precedent is pretty much irrelevant right? So we just have a judge without any common sense here, and most likely this won't be repeated in other such cases.

> the judicial system itself is based on Roman law rather than Common Law or the Napoleonic Continental System

Says on Wikipedia[0] that it's a hybrid of Roman and English law. Why did they even use Roman law at all? The Roman Empire had been gone for several centuries, and England was in control after the 1707 Acts of Union, so it's surprising they didn't reform the system to follow English procedures.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_law

Why did they even use Roman law at all

One of the difference between Roman (aka civil) law and English (aka common) law is the that precent matters differently.

Lots of countries in Europe are based on civil aka Roman law.

The Act of Union in 1707 Scottish law was guaranteed to continue after the union, that was a demand. Why didn't they change it? Probably for the same reason the USA adopt Mexican law? Why should they? It's a different country with different legal systems.

Probably for the same reason the USA adopt Mexican law?

Bad analogy. The US and Mexico are not connected by an Act of Union.

And actually - parts of Mexican law were incorporated by states in the Southwest, where they made sense: primarily land-use and water rights.

It's a different country with different legal systems.

Act of Union - as I read it - united Scotland and England into the same Kingdom. You guys shared a flag, your armies are the same, the currency is the same.

A difference with no distinction.

Now, a prickly Scot could want to keep his oddball legal system and more power to him. But don't get all irate if the rest of the world looks at that choice and wonders that two countries that share currency, an army, a monarch, and etc should not also share the same legal system.

A better example is the US and Louisiana. While obviously, Louisiana is a state of the union, its laws are based on civil law rather than the common law that the rest of US is based on [1]. It's a real pain when dealing with Louisiana contracts and business.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_law

Another distinction is that Scotland has its own devolved parliament. Some issues, including copyright, are reserved to the UK government, but Scotland can (and does) pass its own laws on devolved issues.

And of cause that Scotland likes to emphasize its independence, as probably best illustrated by Scotland's current push to leave the United Kingdom.

It's a bit of a political minefield to start saying "X isn't a real country". It's easy to come up with subjective rules about why X and Y are the same country but A and B aren't. E.g. is Australia a different country from UK (same queen, based on english law, queens appointee can dissolve parliament, etc.)? Is USA and UK same country (same language, legal system similar (but diverged earlier), similar measuring system (inches and miles!), militaristically have been working together). Is UK and France same country? Both in EU, different currency, but EU law taking precendence? Is France and Germany same country? Same currency, similar (civil) legal system, EU law.

These rules about what makes a country are mostly arbitrary and are often made for political reasons to either give power or take power from certain people.

Doesn't matter any more, because now instead of highlighting the point in the article that really matters, it's now been given the even more unenlightening title of the article itself.

Came here to post that. It would be nice to mention it in the title, since it's buried in one of the links to the actual judgements.

Generic titles get more clicks, because the reader needs to click through and read the article to find out whether they're affected by the ruling. For the most clicks, headlines need to be specific enough to pique your interest, but vague enough that you can't feel satisfied that you know the whole story just from the headline. I can't say whether the submitter consciously considered that or not, but this story's headline is a great example of how well it works.

Yeah, it's really annoying that those foreigners don't clearly state that something doesn't take place in the US.

Or isn't that what you actually meant?

No, it's annoying when HN submission titles don't clearly state what jurisdiction articles about law apply to. I would personally have the same objection regardless of the article's nationality.

No. While I am from the US, it's difficult to tell exactly where in the entire world this court case applies to. If it was clearly stated that this was in the UK in the article, I wouldn't have that much of an issue.

Unfortunately, the only way to actually figure out that this was in the UK(as opposed to any of the other Commonwealth states that use similar court systems) was to go to the subsequent articles linked in TFA.

  > If it was clearly stated that this was in the UK
  > in the article, I wouldn't have that much of an issue.

Clearly, because while the US doesn't take any notice of anything anyone else does, anything done in the US eventually applies to everyone else in the world. Therefore everyone in the world has to take notice of everything that happens in the US, while people in the US don't have to care or notice about anything outside.

Given the terminology used in the article, this could have been in Austrailia or New Zealand. Both countries use a similar court system(High Court->Court of Appeals->Supreme Court).

Between those two, the UK, and the US, the only place it was obvious that it could not have happened in was the US. Here, the term "High Court" usually applies only to the Supreme Court.

EDIT: It's also worth noting that it actually matters where in the UK this decision was made, as pointed out by cstross here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4251141

Attempting to figure out the country of origin for every lawsuit, law, and court case referenced on this site is ridiculous. It's difficult to parse it all even if it's clearly denoted, and it rarely is. Please, please add the country of origin to headlines like this.

The NLA contributed to the death of a startup I worked for last year (in Edinburgh, although this is a UK-wide issue, Meltwater being an English company).

At that time, they wanted £5,000 to not sue us, at least that much again, per quarter, for access to a horrific and incomplete API, plus 12p per link per imprint.

Let me repeat that one again: they wanted 12p for every time someone saw a link to their website published by us.

And even THEN, the NLA don't actually speak for all newspapers in the UK - News International publications are not licensed, which means that there's no legal path to accessing their content.

It's complete nonsense. One friend suggested using bit.ly to shorten the URLs, paying the NLA their 12p once and letting them go after bit.ly (in America) for the rest.

News Intl. aren't covered? How ironic, News Intl. publications were some of the first to put up pay walls.

It seems like the content provider has little downside to doing this. News aggregator sends traffic to their page + news site seeks 'licensing' fees for that traffic = profit. I suppose there is the potential for the newspaper to lose money in legal fees as well as look like a jerk to people on the internet, but hey, gotta fight the inevitable demise of print media somehow.

Sometimes I just wish they would go out of business already. I think google should stop infringing their copyright too. You know, indexing Their Stuff and making links to it. That could do the trick. I wonder what they'd say then.

We see first hand what happens when disrupting incumbents who happen to also control politicians and have some good friends in the legal system. Hopefully the current people movement against copyright mafia will see further victories...

What does it mean to go out of business? Don't most newspapers make a loss? [1] (Excluding The Sun, obviously.) I don't think the motivation for funding them is profit, but influence, and so they'll continue to be produced for quite a while.

Regarding Google, didn't Murdoch complain about just that? [2]

[1] Well, at least The Times and The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jul/20/times-paywall-re... mentions a daily loss of £240,000 for The Times, and http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/10/guardian-media-g... suggests similar (if not as great) losses by The Guardian. http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/tim-de-lisle/ca... suggests a calculation of £100,000 a day. However, The Telegraph appears to make a profit, as suggested here because of merging their digital and print media: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/18/telegraph-group-... — though I get the feeling that it would still be funded somewhat past the point of profitability too…

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/07/rupert-murdoch-g...

Good point.

However, I think even Mr Murdoch's personal wealth could not sustain the losses of digital news outlets should Google comply and stop indexing them. By any means, they just have to put a little piece of text in their robots file to do just that - so this is yet more talk in favor of strong copyrights, and no action to renew anything.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/robots.txt would suggest that they are already doing that for their paywalled sites, wouldn't it?

> It seems like the content provider has little downside to doing this.

Seems obvious, but not to everyone. Some of those companies are trying everything they can to claw a buck (or in this case, a pound) wherever they can, no matter who it hurts.

The sensible thing for cutbot to do is just cut them off (no pun intended).

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