Is linking to illegal free-movie streaming websites itself copyright infringement? (Site hosted in Canada) Would a website containing a list of links to free-movie websites be considered illegal? The &quot;free movie websites&quot; are hosting copyrighted movies without permission. Note, the site in question is not linking to particular movies on these sites. It is just providing a list of the free-movie websites that exist. Would this be illegal? Also, what if the website still provided the same list of website links, but it was meant as a &quot;blacklist&quot; of sorts. With warnings saying &quot;Please do not go to these websites because they are illegal and infringe copyright. This list is provided as reference so you can avoid these bad websites. Please make sure to add these bad websites to your site-blockers and firewalls.&quot; Would this &quot;warning&quot; website be illegal?
No. This would not be illegal. There is considerable case law holding that a mere link to a website is not itself actionable, either civilly or criminally, for wrongdoing by the operator of the destination site. This said, even though it would not be a breach of copyright, per se, in some circumstances one could imagine the link, together with other actions to give the link more context and substance (e.g. a revenue sharing agreement with the illegal website operator based upon clicks referred from your site) to support a claim of civil conspiracy to violate copyright laws, or even a criminal conspiracy to do so. But, it would be very hard to make out a civil or criminal conspiracy claim against someone who maintained a &quot;warning&quot; site. Similarly, it would not be actionable to have a webpage that linked to a website that used to be legitimate when the webpage was set up, if the link then rotted and the site at that address was replaced by a website that streamed videos illegally or promoted child pornography, without your knowledge.
canada Bob is not committing any standalone copyright infringement unless he needs to make a further copy of the material in order to receive it (such as a download). However, Rob is committing an offence punishable by indictment by making for sale an infringing copy (s. 42(1) of the Copyright Act. If Bob, knowing that Rob is selling infringing copies, buys one of them, then Bob commits the offence of possessing a thing while knowing the thing was derived from the commission of an offence punishable by indictment (Criminal Code, s. 354). (Credit to jcaron, who noted this and provided a similar answer for France.)
A more general version of the question, as far as I can see, is &quot;Is Google Drive legal?&quot;. I can create an account and upload files to Google Drive, and I can open them from the cloud using various interfaces. I can directly open only certain files types, others I have to download to the device that I'm using in order to open the file. There are various file storage systems that allow this, most or all of which seem to use some sort of system of password access, file-access permissions and encryption to block access by unauthorized individuals. All systems seems to allow &quot;sharing&quot; of a specified file. Google and colleague escape liability by complying with 17 USC 512 aka the DMCA safe harbor provisions. Basically, they don't know, they don't select uploads, they have a removal procedure, they don't know that the material is infringing, and they &quot;are not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent&quot;. There is a chance that you would be sued for inducing copyright infringement, see MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd, specifically We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties You describe a situation that is unlikely to be found to constitute inducement to infringing, instead it is &quot;enabling possible infringing&quot;, and mere possibilty of doing something bad with a tool does not make you liable for selling a tool, under current US law. An eyebrow would be raised, though, as to why this service only allows ebooks to be deposited.
"Public domain" refers to things in principle copyrightable but where protection has lapsed, been repudiated, or is a statutory exception (such as government works). A website is not "in the public domain". The idea that a website is "public property" is (*cough*) mistaken. There are basically two ways in which a web interaction could be illegal. The first regards whether accessing another person's computer is illegally accessing a computer, which is a crime. Authorization essentially comes down to "permission": if the owner permits me to access the computer, I am authorized. Putting stuff out there on a web server is an open-ended grant of permission to look at a web page. That simply means that if I create a web page (with a bunch of links or not), I am granting you permission to interact with my computer to that extent. It does not create permission to hack into a password-protected subdirectory. An ordinary web crawler automates what a clicking human does. Copyright law is also relevant, in that the stuff I put on my webpage is not to be copied without permission. Any webpage access necessarily involves automatic copying from machine to machine: in putting stuff out there for the world to see, I am saying that the world can do that level of automatic copying that arises from normal html-and-click interactions. It does not mean that you can download and do stuff with my copyrighted content (i.e., it is not an abandonment of copyright: I did not put that stuff in the public domain). Putting a web page out there in an unrestricted fashion means that you've given a certain level of permission to "copy" (at least in the automatic server-to-browser viewing sense). I may want to impose conditions on peoples' access to my stuff, so I can impose terms on such material. For instance, I may require users to agree to certain conditions before accessing the CoolStuff subdirectory. Users then have to jump through a minor hoop and agree to those terms. In that case, my permission is conditional, and if you violate the terms of that agreement, I may be able to sue you for copyright infringement. It could then be a violation of my terms of service (TOS) if I say "you may not crawl my website" (in less vague language). A TOS gets its legal power from copyright law, because every webpage interaction involves copying (I assume that technical point is obvious), and copying can only be done with permission. You may technologically overcome my weak click-through technology so that the bot just says "sure whatever" and proceeds to illegally use my web page: I can sue you now for copyright infringement. The robot-specific methods of meta-tags and robots.txt have no legal force. Although there is a way to say "no you may not," which is tailored to automated access, the meaning and enforcement of these devices has not yet reached the law. If my page uses NOFOLLOW and your program doesn't know or care, you (your program) do not (yet) have a duty to understand, detect and respect that tag. Prior registration is also not a legal requirement, and very many pages that are on the master crawl list get there from being linked to by someone else's web page. Again, there is at present no legal requirement of pre-registration (and there is no effective mechanism for verifying that the site owner has registered the site). Archiving and especially re-displaying someone's content is, on the other hand, not legal. It would be plainly copyright infringement if you were to scoop up someone else's webpage and host it. You can analyze their material and somehow associate it with some search terms, and display a link to that page, but you cannot copy and republish their material. You can put very short snippets out there taken from a web page, under the "fair use" doctrine, but you can't wholesale republish a webpage. (It should be noted that the archive.org is an internationally recognized library, and libraries have extra statutory powers to archive).
First of all, taking a video made by someone else, making alterations and then distributing the resulting work is probably already a copyright violation. There are exemptions like fair use (check the comments for an example), but just taking a whole video, mirroring it and reposting it without any own contribution very likely does not constitute fair use. The people who do that don't avoid copyright infingement. They just try to avoid getting caught by any automatic system YouTube has in place to detect copyright infringements. But avoiding automatic filters does not mean to avoid DMCA takedown notices, cease&amp;desist letters or lawsuits from real humans who find a mirrored version of their video and feel that their copyright was violated. However, alterations to a creative work can be a creative work in itself. So regardless of the fact that one violated copyright in creating a derivative work, that derivative work might still be eligible for copyright in its own right. That means someone who reposts a video originally made by party A and then altered by party B would violate the copyright of both A and B at once and thus expose themselves to potential legal actions from either party. But the question is if simply mirroring a video constitutes the necessary threshold of originality to make the resulting work eligible for copyright. In most courts, it probably would not.
&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.
You may have issues if you take their content wholesale. Even if they freely distribute them, they still retain copyright. As such, they absolutely can claim copyright. Whether they will or not is another question. Your best bet around this is Fair Use doctrine. You can take a part of their work (e.g: a single question) and do your video based on how you work out your answer, with your video mainly focusing on the 'working out' part (thus satisfying the 'educational purposes' part)
What copyright or trademark law permits and what Google's terms of service permit may well not be the same thing. It is not &quot;illegal&quot; to violate the ToS unless they form a binding contract, which often they will not. Even when they do, unless some cognizable harm is done, a violation of the TOS is probably not enforceable by suit or in any other way. Embedding via an Iframe simply points the browser to another site, and probably is not legally different from including a clickable link. Using CSS to alter the display might be considered to be creating a derivative work, and thus to be a copyright infringement if done without permission. Somce the linked document says: &quot;Don’t remove, obscure, or alter any of our branding, logos, or legal notices.&quot; making any such change woule violate the terms of the ToS, although this might not be an enforceable restriction. It is also IMO doubtful whether a &quot;share&quot; button constitutes part, of the &quot;branding, logos, or legal notices.&quot;