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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

I love this because it should decide once and for all whether linking to "infringing content" is actually a crime or not. Right now it's already being treated like one, so the downside can't be any worse. But the upside could be that MPAA & friends can't get away with using DMCA to takedown links to infringing content anymore, which means Google will be able to reject all the mass-takedown of links in its search engine, too.

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>I love this because it should decide once and for all whether linking to "infringing content" is actually a crime or not.

That's already been decided, multitudes of times over many cases. Adding indirection to infringing material does not shield you from liability.

Soooo...HN (or whoever posted this) is now also infringing, since it's just more indirection? And anyone now linking to HN is also infringing? I think that eventually encompasses the whole of WWW.

Be serious. Courts usually take a very pragmatic view on this and take intent and context into account. HN linking to the Gawker story is seen differently than piratebay posting magnet links, even though the level of indirection is higher in the latter case.

But you find the exact same links that Gawker posted in this very thread.

Does that make HN guilty of copyright infringement or not?

From the POV of a court, bits are coloured [0]. Just because two links are exactly equal, it does not mean that either both of them infringe or both don't.

[0] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

That link was super interesting. I found this concept frustratingly hard to explain to people, so I think I'll try this explanation next time.

I think (and the article also suggests) that it is especially hard to explain to people who come from a CS background. We often get too caught up in our own way of seeing the world that does not, for better or worse, correspond to how most people see it.

You should read up on DMCA Safe Harbor. It's a very important concept that you should understand.

To answer your question, no.

Did you consider taking that position to its logical end before proposing it?

It doesn't look to me like macspoofing is proposing this- just saying it's what the courts have decided.

Why should I? Courts don't. As I wrote in another post, courts have a more pragmatic view than you give them credit for and take intent and context into account. This is why torrent files and magnet links and other levels of indirection won't shield piratebay and other such sites from liability, and also why HN linking to a Gawker story (which links to copyrighted material) isn't going to cause problems for HN.

Sorry, sarcasm detector fail

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