Why is there an apparent legal bias against digital services? Over the years, many websites - mostly file-sharing websites - have been taken down due to the users using the service for less-than-legal activities. Most of these websites posted well-visible disclaimers on their website that such use goes against the intent of the website. Often the scope of operations went well beyond reasonably moderated on a user level. At the same time, if someone were to use any other service or product for illegal ends, it is the individual rather than the company that is punished (whether it is guns, chemicals, or anything else). Why does this apparent bias against digital services exist - and is it actually codified?
This involves interaction between legal liability, the nature of online services, and copyright law. If a person does something that causes damage, they may be liable and required to pay for damage. Given the right protected by copyright law, damage results in making unauthorized copies of a work, and the copier can be made to pay. A person who contributes to bringing about damage can also be held responsible, depending on their exact relationship to the damage (copyright infringement in relevant cases), so in Gershwin Publishing v. Columbia Artists, Columbia organized a musical event where various artists did the infringing performances, knowing very well that there was no permission as required by law. The court held that "one who, with knowledge of the infringing activity, induces, causes or materially contributes to the infringing conduct of another, may be held liable as a 'contributory' infringer". There are various nuances regarding how a potential enabler might or might not be held liable. In MGM v. Grokster, Grokster knew that their software was primarily used to disseminate protected material, and encouraged infringement. Similarly (and earlier), Napster was found to be contributorily liable in A&amp;M v. Napster. On the other hand, in Sony v. Universal, it was found that Sony was not liable for selling VCRs which allowed people to infringe copyright, primarily because Sony did not sell the VCR with the intent of aiding copyright infringement. Such "codification" as exists regarding contributory infringement and liability is due to case law. Congress could, if it wanted to (it does not), pass a law saying that no online service can be held liable for copyright infringement. This would require changes in copyright law, since online services do copy content (taking it from a contributor involves copying, delivering it to a customer does to), and they obviously distribute the material (usually by automated means, but that is still distribution). Any use of digital content in fact involves making many copies, almost all of them automatic (copying from an input port to a data buffer; copying from the buffer to disk storage; copying from disk storage to RAM; from RAM to computer registers; etc. where derivatives are "copied" to the speaker or computer screen). This fact makes digital services particularly vulnerable, since virtually everything that they do involves "making a copy". Congress passed the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provided a way for online providers to be protected from liability, as long as they have "clean hands" and follow certain rules. The essence of this law is that if you provide a means for copyright owners to inform you of violations, and you respond expeditiously to proper notices by taking down infringing material, you may be protected. Simply posting a notice that says "we do not condone breaking the law" does not eliminate liability. If one takes reasonable steps to prevent infringement, you would not be liable. Apart from copyright infringement, websites can also be engaged in distributing child pornography, which also is against the law (even more so). And once you go outside the US, and are in a country with limited free speech protection, making forbidden statements can get you shut down. Getting "shut down" can come in multiple forms: one, where the company goes out of business because the damages that they have to pay are substantial, and also because the government can directly order a web site shut down (as in the Napster case). If online services are more susceptible to being shut down compared to other businesses, it is probably due to the mistaken feeling of anonymity and failure to understand copyright law.
You can't, in general, know whether a distributor of a work has permission to distribute, or is a pirate site. I verified that they have posted an illegal copy of a work that I created, and I know that I did not grant permission to them (or anyone) to infringe my copyright. Both hosting and downloading works without permission is a violation of copyright law, so both parties are liable. Downloaders may erroneously rely on the "I didn't know!" defense, which in the US carries no legal weight. Even so, if you download my book, it will probably cost me vastly more to sue you for infringement than the damages that I might be awarded over your infringement. Usually, copyright holders go after the pirate sites, and only rarely go after particularly egregious serial downloaders.
You may at your peril. The safe harbor provision in 17 USC 512 does not provide absolute immunity to service providers, that immunity is only available (c)(1) if the service provider—(A)...(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent Given your question, which reasonably assumes that the material is infringing, infringement is apparent. The DMCA provisions were written not to protect service providers, but to protect innocent service providers who are not aware of the infringing activities of their users. So it depends on what you know.
Apparently Such Files May be Distributes or Sold Section 5.e of the Google APIs Terms of Service reads: e. Prohibitions on Content Unless expressly permitted by the content owner or by applicable law, you will not, and will not permit your end users or others acting on your behalf to, do the following with content returned from the APIs: Scrape, build databases, or otherwise create permanent copies of such content, or keep cached copies longer than permitted by the cache header; Copy, translate, modify, create a derivative work of, sell, lease, lend, convey, distribute, publicly display, or sublicense to any third party; Misrepresent the source or ownership; or Remove, obscure, or alter any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary rights notices; or falsify or delete any author attributions, legal notices, or other labels of the origin or source of material It might seem that 5.e.2 prohibits the suggested use. But if the text is in fact in the public domain,&quot;applicable law&quot; (that is, copyright law) permits you, or anyone, to &quot;Copy, translate, modify, create a derivative work of&quot; or otherwise use the content. Thus 5.e.2 does not apply. Points 3 and 4 would seem to indicate that the source, including title and author information, must be included or preserved in the output files, but seems to be the only relevant restriction that applies. Response to Comment A comment by user Brian Drake questions the theory of this answer, stating: The most you can say is that copyright law does not prohibit certain conduct (and even that is not clear: just because the text is in the public domain does not necessarily mean that the audio is in the public domain); this does not mean that copyright law expressly permits that conduct. US Copyright law does not define what constitutes the public domain. Rather it defines what is protected by copyright, and specifies some cases in whch a work is not protected. (For nexample, 17 USC 105 provides tht works of the US Federal Government are not protected.) Anything not included in the protection of copyright is in the public domain. This has been confirmed by many cour cases and legal writings. Law generally follows the rule &quot;Anything not forbidden is allowed.&quot; Audio as Derivitive Work An audio recording of a person reading a text aloud would be a derivative work of that text, and would normally have its own copyright, if created lawfully. (If the recording was of a text protected by copyright, made without permission and outside of fair use, it was not made lawfully and the infringer has no copyright in the recording at all.) But US courts have held that a work created by a mechanical or automatic process, including many computer programs, is not an &quot;original work of authorship&quot; and thus is not protected by copyright at all, and is thus in the Public Domain. The case of the &quot;Monkey Selfie&quot; is on point. (&quot;Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, § 313.2&quot; (PDF). United States Copyright Office. 22 December 2014. p. 22. &quot;To qualify as a work of 'authorship' a work must be created by a human being.... Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable. The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants.&quot; Moreover, if the audio were protected by copyright, it would presumably be owned by the person who ran the program, and 17 USC 106 specifically grants the copyright owner permission to distribute copies. Sources The Wikipedia article &quot;Public Domain&quot; reads in relevant part (citations omitted): The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired,[1] been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. ... As rights vary by country and jurisdiction, a work may be subject to rights in one country and be in the public domain in another. Some rights depend on registrations on a country-by-country basis, and the absence of registration in a particular country, if required, gives rise to public-domain status for a work in that country. ... Definitions of the boundaries of the public domain in relation to copyright, or intellectual property more generally, regard the public domain as a negative space; that is, it consists of works that are no longer in copyright term or were never protected by copyright law. According to James Boyle this definition underlines common usage of the term public domain and equates the public domain to public property and works in copyright to private property. However, the usage of the term public domain can be more granular, including for example uses of works in copyright permitted by copyright exceptions. Such a definition regards work in copyright as private property subject to fair-use rights and limitation on ownership *&quot;How Can I Use Copyright-Free Works (in the Public Domain)?&quot; by Nolo Press reads: Copyright law gives creators certain exclusive rights. These rights include the exclusive ability to copy, distribute, and perform the copyrighted work. But copyright is not infinite. Rather, it provides copyright holders with protections for a limited duration. When a work becomes available for use without permission from a copyright owner, it is said to be &quot;in the public domain.&quot; Most works enter the public domain because their copyrights have expired. The Legal Information Institute (LII) article &quot;public domain&quot; reads: The public domain includes every creative work that is no longer protected by a copyright, trademark, or patent. Creative works that are no longer protected are owned by the general public rather than the original creator. As such, the work is free to be copied, performed, or otherwise used by anyone. &quot;Copyright and Scholarship: Public Domain&quot; from Boston College Libraries reads in relevant part: &quot;Public domain&quot; works are not protected by copyright. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it. An important caveat regarding public domain material is that collections, new editions, and derivative works of public domain material may all be protected by copyright. With collections, an author could collect public domain works in a book or display them on a website, and the collection as a whole could be protected by copyright, even though individual works within it are not. *&quot;Welcome to the Public Domain&quot; (Stanford libraries) reads in relevant part: The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it. Wikipedia article &quot;Monkey selfie copyright dispute&quot; *&quot;A macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs cannot be declared the copyright owner of the photos&quot; (AP) reads in relevant part: A macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs cannot be declared the copyright owner of the photos, a federal judge said Wednesday. U.S. District Judge William Orrick said in federal court in San Francisco that &quot;while Congress and the president can extend the protection of law to animals as well as humans, there is no indication that they did so in the Copyright Act.&quot; *NARUTO, a Crested Macaque, by and through his Next Friends, People forthe Ethical Treatment of Animals, Inc., v. DAVID JOHN SLATER; BLURB, INC., ; WILDLIFE PERSONALITIES, LTD.&quot; (Ninth Circuit full opinion April 23, 2018 No. 16-15469, D.C. No. 3:15-cv-04324-WHO) reads in part: We must determine whether a monkey may sue humans, corporations, and companies for damages and injunctive relief arising from claims of copyright infringement. Our court’s precedent requires us to conclude that the monkey’s claim has standing under Article III of the United States Constitution. Nonetheless, we conclude that this monkey—and all animals, since they are not human—lacks statutory standing under the Copyright Act. We therefore affirm the judgment of the district court
It could be. Accessing any web page is subject to whatever the terms of use are for the page, and if those terms state that the page may only be accessed from within the US, then accessing the page from outside the US is a violation of the TOS (hence use is infringing): see 2.4(h) of the Netflix EULA. There are EU rules that override such terms, within the EU. The usual way to circumvent technological location-restrictions (where the web page says "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that") is to use a VPN and pretend to be somewhere else. Use of a VPN is not per se illegal in most countries (there are exceptions), but using it to circumvent geo-blocking may be. Again returning to the point that the TOS may itself say "No you may not", the interesting question is what to conclude if there is no such statement, for example I did not see anything in the PBS TOS that restricts access to the US (I didn't look very deeply). Terms of service can't be secret: you can't be held to following rules that you cannot reasonably know of. If you attempt to access a page that uses un-announced geo-blocking technology and it informs you that you can't use the page because of your location, then you have effectively been put on notice that there is a rule. If you happen to be using a VPN and access an un-announced, (reasonably) undetectable geo-blocked site, that would not be a breach of the terms (because you have not been put on notice that location is a term of use).
Is it possible to forbid linking to a site? No. It would be quite childish and out of touch to aspire to that level of control. Publishing a website/page for permanent, wide open access is inconsistent with prohibiting accessing it from certain venues, such as hypertext links. The prohibition of linking to a site is an attempt to enforce a certain degree of selective privacy. As such, it would not be enforced by U.S. courts, and it would be laughable if other jurisdictions proceeded differently. In United States v. Forrester, 512 F.3d 500, 510 (9th Cir. 2008), the court wrote that e-mail and Internet users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from addresses of their messages or the IP addresses of the websites they visit because they should know that this information is provided to and used by Internet service providers for the specific purpose of directing the routing of information. That rationale is equally --or perhaps even more-- applicable to a publisher, since in this case browsers and/or the publisher himself post(s) his URL (the equivalent of a "from" address of emails) "for the specific purpose of directing the routing of information". A hyperlink is an address, so it would be similar, I believe, to disallowing someone to list an address (on a map for instance). That analogy is inadequate because it overlooks essential differences between a web address and a physical (be it home, office, etc.) address. A web address is used for obtaining information which the initial publisher deliberately makes available to the public. By contrast, the act of having one's physical address registered somewhere else serves no such purpose whatsoever. Another important difference between a hyperlink and a physical address is that "consuming" a hyperlink simply cannot annoy or harm the initial publisher (except in the extreme scenario of Denial-of-Service attacks), whereas a common knowledge of a person's address may make that person vulnerable to harassment, trespassing, larceny, and other unlawful acts. A better analogy with hypertext links would be bibliographical references, since both are types of text strings for directing the consumer to a (or "the") source of information. Neither text string causes detriment to the author/source of that information. Can you imagine if bibliographical references were forbidden by statute or by the author of that information? The mere difference that a bibliographical reference needs to be copied/pasted, whereas it suffices to click on a hypertext link, cannot permit treating the permissibility of hypertext links any differently than the permissibility of bibliographical references.
&quot;Personal use only&quot; does not excuse copyright infringement under US law. The uploader does not hold copyright, and neither gives nor denies permission to copy his creation. The law does not require a copyright holder to deny permission, it requires the user to actually obtain permission. So no matter how you slice it (even as fair use) it is infringement for you to copy that video.
Forget about copyright or EULAs. In the UK this would be illegal under the Computer Misuse Act (1998) and you could be jailed for up to a year - specifically Unauthorised access to computer material. (1)A person is guilty of an offence if— (a)he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer, or to enable any such access to be secured; (b)the access he intends to secure, or to enable to be secured, is unauthorised; and (c)he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case. This law has been applied even to simply altering parameters in a GET request to a website, so it is incredibly broad. Other jurisdictions have similar wording, so be aware!