p2pnet - rss feed: the-Realworld.de court ruling
p2p news / p2pnet:- When German eDonkey2000 TV indexing site the-Realworld.de, hosted in Switzerland, went offline in August, it was wholly thanks to a strictly US concern, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).
Now the District Court in Hamburg has ruled that by making “edited” links which allowed people to download TV shows available, the site infringed the German Copyright Act (UrhG), says Heise Online.
“The respondent in the case had operated a website which without the consent of the copyright holders in question contained links to eDonkey downloads from a diverse array of TV series such as ‘Emergency Room,’ ‘Sopranos’ and ‘Alf’,” says the story.
“In the opinion of the judges from Hamburg this particular offer on the Internet gave the copyright holders a claim to injunctive relief in accordance with § 97 UrhG. They alone had the right to disseminate or make public the copyright-protected works of cinematographic art in question, the judges found.”
The MPAA is demanding 150,000 euros (about $180,525).
Heise says it doesn’t know if an appeal is being contemplated.
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See:-
went offline - the-realworld.de goes down, August 24, 2005
Heise Online - Offering eDonkey links to copyrighted material constitutes a violation of copyright law, September 28, 2005
September 28th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
surely this can only apply to tv shows in america not as a whole, it is up to the individual companies who hold the copyrights to take action against realworld, the majority of the shows on there were not american in origin and therfore have no bearing on the outcome,surely any money the mpaa extorts from the realworld should be divided equally among every shows copyright holder’s that appear on there????
September 28th, 2005 at 7:06 pm
If the show was already broacast over the air for free, then broacasting over the Internet should be considered fair use.
September 28th, 2005 at 8:09 pm
The MPAA considers fair use to be anything they get paid for more than once.
September 29th, 2005 at 4:15 am
if the site was hosted in switzerland, why was it seen in a german court, even if it was a (dot)de domain?
September 29th, 2005 at 5:28 am
They’d argue that the lack of ads in the internet broadcasts would violate this.
Then again, couldn’t someone else argue that removing the ads has created a “derivative work”? Assuming i’m not totally wrong.
September 29th, 2005 at 10:16 am
The MPAA requested an injunction against the-realworld.de that it would stop operation or pay 250,000€. The court granted this requested and also decided that the-realworld.de has to carry the cost of litigation.
In the German judicial system the cost of litigation is calculated depending on the amount in controversy which was set to 150,000€ by the judge.