NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Court ruling against NewzBin may lead to more legal attacks on search engines
Court ruling against NewzBin may lead to more legal attacks on search engines http://bit.ly/d7KZWQ (Financial Times) This is a very important case. I've been saying for quite some time that I believed search engines to be the "new frontier" when it came to legal attacks on Internet content. As firms and governments have come to realize that snuffing out all copies of specific content (whether pirated or simply politically undesirable) is essentially impossible, I've long felt that we'd see increasing moves to find legal ways to force search engines to remove references to such content -- since if you can't find them, they might as well not exist in a practical sense for most people. This issue is not entirely new of course, since there are already some restrictions that various national governments other than China impose on search engines (of much more limited scope than the vast censorship requirements imposed by China, it should be noted). But the Newzbin case appears to drastically push the envelope by declaring that Newzbin, as an indexing service (not a download repository) is directly responsible for the piracy related to downloads listed in their index. Since Newzbin apparently provided some "value added" beyond their "raw" indexing (that "non-raw" value became the focus of the case), it could be argued that this case is an anomaly not representative of search engines who implement a more fully "hands off," fully automated approach. However, various observers are taking quite expansive views of what this decision might mean for search engines in general across various contexts. This definitely bears watching. --Lauren-- NNSquad Moderator