Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that the UI was pretty incidental in most judges' interpretations that platforms used mainly to locate copyrighted material were on shakier ground than platforms which incidentally, and despite ostensibly significant efforts on the part of developers to limit it, could be used to locate copyright material. It's not like Google doesn't get hit by content-provider lawsuits either, it's just that they're big enough to usually get a settlement agreed on favourable terms and far too big to be bankrupted by legal costs, which is a wider and more general problem with litigation.

Ironically I'm writing this listening to YouTube streaming in the background: a far superior free way to locate and listen to music without paying for it than most of the early pirate platforms ever could have hoped to be.

View on HN

When people think of "copyrighted" material they usually think Songs, Movies etc. However if you stop and think about it most content on the web is copyrighted, from the news articles you search for to images and websites themselves. With that in mind Google also is used "mainly to locate copyrighted material"

Hosted by the copyright holder. A crucial distinction!

And, in the case of websites, _almost always shared with the copyright holders' permission_.

Yes, except those pesky infoboxes.. Google is starting to serve answers right on search result pages, which to me seems a bit murkier.

Do judges count how it is intended to be used? If we are counting only use and not intended use, then this just means that if a bunch of pirates (or worse) are your initial users then you are in the wrong. That sounds absurd (though I could see a lot of people, in tech and otherwise, wanting to make Tor illegal because of one of its predominant uses). But if it is based on intention, it still doesn't differentiate between the technology being intended for legal use that may not different from illegal use, which is no less absurd. Consider a tool that allows pushing apps onto phones. It is intended primarily to allow apps to be pushed, but the tool has no way to check if the user pushing the app onto the phone has the legal right to push the app and the legal right to push software onto the phone in question.

It seems that making this a legal minefield that requires an existing well funded legal department is nothing short of regulatory capture.

that's the thing with judges and jury. (despite what TV show with precedence and such)

nobody knows!

so the law is only slightly just for whoever has the money to keep appealing decisions until they find one they like (and the opponent is out of money to appeal further).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com