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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

IANAL, but my reading of that is if one makes money from one's site (e.g. by having ads) then EU will assume that one knows whether or not linked content is infringing. Because €10/month from adwords is totally enough to hire a lawyer to evaluate every link that users post.

Anyway, how does that "specifically address" GP's question about mutability? That isn't even mentioned in the bolded text.

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As far as I can see from the rest of the document, the reason why profit motive is clumsily forced into that sentence is because it was argued that the act of posting the link itself was an attempt to increase the site's revenue because the owners were aware the public would be interested in visiting their webpage linking to the material because it wasn't authorised for publication anywhere at the time. Hence their decision to draw attention to it with "leaked pics" headline and post-DMCA-takedown followup headlines referring to the copyright holder whilst linking to new copies of the material. In other words they're saying that a publisher that has demonstrated awareness that a particular piece of material is so difficult to find that they can generate extra pageviews and revenue from communicating the fact they have a link to it, they can reasonably be expected to have carried out some checks to the provenance of the linked material. We're talking about a situation where the existence of the link and intimation that it might not be authorised was the subject of a headline, not an entry in a directory or search result. A natural reading of "links are provided without the pursuit of financial gain" is that if the posting of hyperlink(s) to copyrighted material is incidental to the profitability of your site you're probably not in danger of falling foul of that particular directive.

There are other more unambiguous statements acknowledging existing case law which appears to rule out webmasters falling foul of websites' mutability like: The user makes an act of communication when it intervenes, in full knowledge of the consequences of its action, to give access to a protected work to its customers, and does so, in particular, where, in the absence of that intervention, its customers would not, in principle, be able to enjoy the broadcast work

Since links are just addresses that can be followed automatically, I strongly disagree with the ruling that this applies under the cited precedence;

in the absence of that intervention, its customers would not, in principle, be able to enjoy the broadcast work

Anything already in a public index should not be illegal to point to.

> Because €10/month from adwords is totally enough to hire a lawyer to evaluate every link that users post.

And that’s where courts will just classify you as noncommercial.

If you don’t make enough with it to finance your lifestyle, it’s very likely not really commercial.

That's not true - at least for Germany. Here a repeated action to earn a profit is considered commercial activity.

I'm not sure what a court would think about 10€/m, but I guess 100€/m would be considered commercial.

EDIT: the common description of being commercial in Germany is: a planned, longer term acting to make money - it's not even necessary to make a profit. Source (in German): http://www.it-recht-kanzlei.de/verbraucher-unternehmer.html

Yes, but there’s a legal difference, and courts in Germany have to take Verhältnismäßigkeit into account.

You can’t sue the parents of a kid selling lemonade in their frontyard, even though it’d technically be a violation of the Lebensmittelverordnung.

Just like a small webblog which does not even qualify as Nebeneinkunft, and which is not taxable, would also be not relevant for such a case, unless you published it knowing it was illegal to make that money.

The ruling acknowledges that targets linked to are mutable, but it's just that, an acknowledgement. Not being a lawyer, I can't say what it means for a judge to confirm that link targets are not immutable, and leaving it at that.

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