Recently the Dutch entertainment industry's anti-piracy association BREIN sued Zoekmp3.nl (Techno Design) for copyright violation as its search engine service provided links to illegally hosted music. However a court in the Dutch city ofHaarlem ruled that providing links to music whether or not the music is unlawfully hosted did not violate the Dutch copyright law. This effectively means that the website has the right to continue providing its service.
Zoekmp3.nl is one of the 20 most popular Dutch websites which received 50,000 daily visitors and has a database of around 30,000 links to music. This is a world first that a court had to deal with the legality of a bot that grabs links to music from websites. Techno's lawyer claims that the sites illegally hosting the music should be dealt with not the search engines. BREIN plans on appealing the verdict.
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Zoekmp3.nl, which appears in the top twenty of the most popular Dutch websites, has access to some 30,000 music links. In its hey-day, Zoekmp3.nl had some 50,000 daily visitors and offered MP3 music files worldwide through an estimated 200,000 web pages. The court ruled that providing links to an MP3 file did not constitute disclosure or publication of contents according to Dutch copyright law. |
On the other hand if the bot had been ruled unlawful, it may bring on issues with other search engines that have links to unlawful content in their database. For example nearly every search engine will return results to websites containing pirate software, music and so on with certain combinations of keywords. With zoekmp3, their bot went through websites like any other bot from other search engines, but instead just filtered its content by MP3 links rather than HTTP links.
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Source: Digital media news for Europe
