At the end of September, the Court of Cassation, the Supreme French Court, issued
two important rulings on the subject of Copyright Protection Online.
These judgments involved two separate aspects of the ongoing fight against
illegal publication of intellectual property online.
- In the first case, the Supreme French Court ruled that, when a report has already been made against an illegal content uploaded online (and the consequent removal procedure has been throughly carried out), the host provider (in this case Google / Youtube) can not be held responsible if the content in question is again uploaded on its servers, but it is up to the copyright owner to report the presence of such content and ask again for its removal; in this case, the Court overturruled what had been held by the Court of Appeal, which had held that a single notice was sufficient against a specific content, but doing so indirectly called into question a surveillance obligation, seemingly
imposing Google to prevent a specific video (which had been already removed) from being uploaded again on Youtube.
- In the second case, Google was considered responsible for not having removed from its keyword list (meaning the words which are automatically “suggested” while typing a websearch), some terms that would facilitate the users in finding pirated material online (eg.: torrent, megaupload, rapidshare, and similar); in this case, the Court, reversing
the conclusions issued by previous judges, ruled that “the electronic communications service offered to the public by Google systematically guides internet users, by means of specific keyword suggestions, towards websites that contain recordings made available to the public without the permission of the respective artists / authors / performers or record labels, thus facilitating the infringement of copyright”.
The first of the judgments above seems in line with the most recent ones observed at European level, confirming that, even for French Courts, the host provider acts as mere conduit, and does not seem to have any obligation to oversee what its users post online, as long as it promptly acts for speedy removal, once asked to do so by the rightholders.
As for the second ruling, the most obvious point is that, in spite of the declarations made a few months ago, Google still does not seem to have cleaned up its autocomplete function from words which encourage and/or facilitate searching for pirated material online.