Posted on February 17th, 2012
Anti-copyright Filters Cannot work for Web Hosts
The ECJ or The European Court of Justice has declared that web hosting services and organizations should be exempt from the incorporation of filtration software. According to their judgment, such businesses cannot be judged on the basis of content copyright infringement since it would drastically compromise the users’ ability to create an online presence for their enterprises.
According to the court hearing, screening web content on a website will be detrimental to large scale business goals. Incidentally, such an action will also threaten copyright holder rights.
“That injunction could potentially undermine freedom of information, since that system might not distinguish adequately between unlawful content and lawful content, with the result that its introduction could lead to the blocking of lawful communications,” the Luxembourg-court said.
It was also said that if any courtroom allowed such filters to be placed they, “would not be respecting the requirement that a fair balance be struck between the right to intellectual property, on the one hand, and the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or impart information, on the other”.
The court was ordered to handle the case by Brussel’s District Court of First Instance in order to ascertain whether the EU clauses allowed web hosts to incorporate copyright filters or not. The catalyst Belgian case was the one which incited this ruling the first place. SABAM, the music rights organization, had also suffered a similar ruling set against Netlog, the Belgian MP3 sharing network. Known famously as the ‘scarlet ruling’ the association was informed that it is forbidden to use blank bans.
According to Digital Rights Ireland association’s TJMcIntyre, the court’s decision was nothing to write home about and was a mere “copy and paste” of the Scarlet one.
“Maybe it’s significant in that they’re applying the same criteria to uploaded content as network traffic,” he remarked. He also claimed that a content host is more liable to this ruling as compared to an ISP, since the latter’s job is limited to transporting online traffic between the two.
“It doesn’t differentiate hosting from simply transmission of data, and doesn’t put extra liability on hosts than on a service provider,” McIntrye said. ”From that point of view it’s another victory for the digital rights movement.”
The court’s ruling was dealt at a time when Junior Research Minister Seán Sherlock makes plans to enable copyright holders to block websites they believe infringe on their privacy laws. If the bill is passed, it can prove to be disastrous for ‘innocent’ sites as well.