Web search, as a relatively new tool, is continually tested by court challenges that seek to determine how liable the engines are for pointing to content that’s, shall we say, legally dubious. Back in February, for instance, a federal judge ruled that Google couldn’t use thumbnails in its image search that link to pirated pics (appeal pending). Now, says InformationWeek, a court in the The Netherlands says that merely linking to material that infringes on copyrights is the same thing as publishing it.
Music search engine www.zoekmp3.nl is therefore history, as its parent company Techno Design Internet Programming BV (long enough for ya?) elected to take down the site rather than pay steep fines. Although the site carried a warning for users not to disobey copyright protections, this was deemed to be a flimsy and ineffective barrier in halting illegal MP3 downloads, what the court described as “the lion’s share” of music downloads. Counsel for the music industry was somewhat triumphant:
“There has been concern that Holland could become a centre of internet piracy, but this decision shows that the Dutch courts will not tolerate websites building a business out of facilitating copyright infringement…It sends a clear message to others operating ‘mp3 search’ services that they will be held liable for the damage that they cause.”
Apparently there’s very little regard for the damage caused to artists who make MP3′s of their music freely available and would like them to be found, as Mike at Techdirt points out. Not to mention, says Mike, that “from the technology side, it wouldn’t be hard…for people to simply build an mp3 search engine on top of Google or Yahoo. Should the industry go after Yahoo and Google and shut them down to stop this?” That seems to be the order of the day…
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