Services like YouTube apparently shouldn’t have protection against users that upload copyright infringing content to its site according to the Music Industry, and Austria agrees.
Reforms are not yet being approved but are becoming more recognised as necessary within European Copyright Law. Safe harbour protection means that sites such as YouTube cannot be held liable if one of its users does the infringing, providing they have the capabilities for the rights owners to remove the content if they so wish.
In Austria, the local TV network called Puls4 sued YouTube because they felt that YouTube shouldn’t have this protection, after users had infringed on Puls4’s copyright by uploading content to YouTube owned by Puls4. This protection was originally meant for what are called ‘intermediaries’ online, with servers or networks that are used to distribute content. The court actually sided with the TV network by saying “through the connections, sorting, filtering and linking, in particular by creating tables of contents according to predefined categories, determining the surfing behaviour of users and creating a tailor-made surfing proposal, offering help etc, YouTube [is more than] a neutral intermediary and therefore cannot claim the host provider privilege”.
It must be noted however, that this ruling is not binding, but could see the Music and Wider Entertainment Industry banging on their drum to review the current copyright laws in this regard, and more notably shout louder for reforms on safe harbour protection, specifically who should actually be protected by it.
We will keep an eye on whether this develops into something greater both in Austria and across Europe.
