Hi Friends, I had some external links on my website that contains a list of websites that show online live streaming of tv channels. I received this email from one of the channel guys saying that i have to remove it as it's copyright infringement and is called contributory copyright infringement I was surprised to know that even containing links to external sites can cause copyright infringement??? They are hosting the content, then how can they say that i am causing copyright infringement??? Any advice guys...as I would like to have those links on my site. Thanks
It depends on the links themselves. Are these links to the main page of the sites? If so, I doubt they have a leg to stand on. If, however, you are directly linking to pages on those sites that contain infringing material then that is considered contributory infringement.
How do the Diggs,Reddits etc survive because they have zillions of live streaming links and thats what they are for ??? What do you say guys???
No,they were not on the homepage ,they were inside a forum thread posted by some member... The channel owners said still it's on our website and we have to remove it...
I wasn't asking if the links were on your homepage. I was asking if the links were to the main page of the sites they were linking to or were they to material with in thoses sites? Example: www.veoh.com - this link is not likely to cause issues www.veoh.com/vid?=infringingVideo - this link can cause you issues As the website owner, if you do not remove offending links then you can be charged with contributory infringement even if the links were posted by users. The protection given to sites under the DMCA from violations by users of the site is only afforded if the site works quickly to remove infringing material when they are alerted to it. If you do not, then there is no legal protection for you. Since I don't know what the links are I couldn't say if this applies to you. As far as Digg-like sites, they benefit from the decisions that came about from the Google news lawsuits. In addition, the links generally are back to the original site. If I put a link to a band's official music download page, that is very different than putting a link to the mp3 file located on some other site (even if the mp3 I link to on another site can be downloaded freely from the band's page). More importantly, if a user submits infringing material and those sites are alerted to this they remove the content quickly.