Yahoo! Liable In Italy For Searchable Content 145
h3rr d0kt0r writes "A recent decision of an Italian court could spark considerable discussion over the liability of a search engines. The court actually ordered Yahoo! to remove any link to any site containing unlawful copies of a movie. Under EU Directives 2003/31, liability of search engines is not regulated (save for caching activities). In the case brought to court regarding the film About Elly, it was not the caching activities of Yahoo! that were questioned (or any content hosted on Yahoo!'s servers), but the mere fact that searching for the film made it possible to reach websites allowing the streaming or downloading of the movie (actually, illegal sites got a better ranking then the official one)."
Berlusconi orders a taxi (Score:2, Insightful)
This is strange, when Berlusconi arrives incognito in Milan and asks a taxi driver to bring him to the whorehouse with the youngest employees, is the taxidriver then responsible for what happens next?
Re:Replace their respective pages with a message (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't it go deeper than that? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree on that - and if you had read my post until the end maybe you would have understood it too.
But still, if according to a law facilitating illegal behaviors is unlawful (as is the case in Italy, but I guess many other countries have similar articles in their body of laws), then they are breaking the law. And the idea that is okay to break the law as far as I don't mind it, seems a little bit idiotic to me, no less than having a judge deciding what a search engine can or can't index.
So, unless we claim that they are above the law, which I wouldn't recommend as a strategy, maybe it would be advisable to have laws that make $you responsible for what you search, as opposed to $search_providers responsible for what they provide, index or cache.
Re:Poor Yahoo! can't catch a break (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No monetary liability it seems (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy response: remove all links to any pages that mention the film "About Elly" at all. Claim technical difficulties. Movie dies on the vine. Movie industry thinks twice before asking for unenforceable shit again.