Where do personal blogs stand with lawsuits? If a person were to setup a blog and got a few of their friends to also post on this blog. Who is to blame if one of those people were to get hit with a lawsuit for copyright infringement? Since this is not a registered business, or even a business, is the owner of the domain going to be the target of the lawsuit or is it the individual who stole and published copyright protected work?
This basically is about the legal responsibility a web-site owner has for user-created content that violate copyright or other laws (such as libel laws). In the USA, this situation is covered by the DMCA. In the EU, this situation is covered by the e-commerce directive. In other jurisdictions, other regulation may apply. The DMCA (USA) is the simplest of those regulations. It stipulates a protocol of Notice and takedown. A web-site owner that complies with this protocol is given Save Harbour. This means that a compliant web-site owner cannot be sued. This goes both for a web-site that is a registered business, and a site run by an individual. The owner of the IP may, however, take the individual who stole and published copyright protected work to court, and will do probably do so if the financial loss was substantial (e.g. a major motion picture was leaked before hitting the cinemas). In the EU, the law is much less explicit than in the USA. Basically, the Notice and takedown protocol works like in the USA, but since it is not part of the law, it is less formal. In the USA, you can safely not act on any complaint that does not strictly follow the protocol (you just have to give feedback so they can fix it). Not so in the EU. And as follows from Delfi AS vs. Estonia, you can be sued even if you take down stuff. In particular if you create an environment for anonymous postings that encourage transgressions and have no means of moderation in place. So if the web-site is located in the EU, the website owner need to exercise more caution when he lets friends publish content, than when a website owner in the USA.
First I should point out that the Google question is about a different situation, the "snippet" issue where a tiny part of a web page is redistributed, where the issue of resolved in the US by appeal to the "fair use" defense. The proposed scenario as written here is broader since it would go beyond a couple of lines, and goes up to the limit of copy an entire web page. That is copyright infringement, with or without an associated link. Copyright protection is not just about attribution, it is about control. If you can limit your copying appropriately, you may survive under a fair use analysis; but you need to hire a lawyer with experience in copyright litigation to vet your notions of what is "a small amount" etc.
If users were to copy dictionary definitions, for instance Oxford or Cambridge) and make the word lists public, is it a copyright infringement? If the dictionary entries are protected by copyright then your user has infringed that copyright by posting the dictionary entries. Am I responsible for this activity? No. But you may be responsible for removing it if you get a request. Can dictionary owners charge me against copyright issue? If you follow the procedures outlines in the DMCA you can be protected from liability.
No. You are correct in that this is not related to Copyright. Copyright is meant to protect expressions of an idea. An URL is simply an address, like a street address. Can you legally stop people referring to your home address? No. Can you legally stop people from passing by and looking at your house on the street? Also no. A famous case related to hyperlink is Ticketmaster v Tickets.com (2000). Tickets.com used information Ticketmaster's website and deep-linked to there. The ruling established that: use of information is not infringing hyperlinking cannot be copyright infringement because no copying is involved. deep linking is not unfair competition If you feel that it is necessary to avoid people linking to specific pages of your site, you may consider accomplishing this technically. UPDATE It does not matter whether your site is meant to be public or not. For example, an knowledge base meant to be shared internally in an organization, but accessible on the internet since staff are geographically distributed. Again, you may think of it like a street address. A private corporate building meant for employees only. An address, like Room C, 16/F, Example Corporate Complex, 4321 Lucky Avenue can be shared like any other address. You cannot demand people to never refer to your office address. You can, however, setup a security post at the entrance and only allow certain guests to visit you. In the case of a website, you may state in your terms that one cannot share access information to any external parties. This will include the sharing of any authentication data (e.g. password) which can be used to access content.
Do you have an explicit permission by the artist? Does the artist give a blanket permission to anyone which covers this kind of use of their work (a license)? If no, then you commit a copyright violation when you use their work for your blog. This applies to practically any country which signed the Berne convention which is almost everywhere in the world. Having no commercial interest is usually not an excuse to violate copyright. Regarding which jurisdiction applies when you, your website and the copyright holder are in different countries: I opened a new question about this.
If the suit is to be filed in the US, the first step is to officially register the copyright. No US copyright infringement suit can be brought until the copyright has been registered. The registration process includes a formal declaration as to who the author is (or authors are). (I believe this statement is made under penalty of perjury.) Once the registration issues, the certificate of registration is admissible evidence of the facts stated in it in a us court. Indeed 17 USC 410 (c) provides that: (c) In any judicial proceedings the certificate of a registration made before or within five years after first publication of the work shall constitute prima facie evidence of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate. The evidentiary weight to be accorded the certificate of a registration made thereafter shall be within the discretion of the court. In other countries, the testimony of the plaintiff in a copyright infringement suit is itself evidence that the work was created as stated. In either case, it is possible for the defendant to challenge the assertion and claim that s/he is the actual author. Showing when and where the work was first published can usefully corroborate the plaintiff's testimony. Having included a copyright notice in the initial publication may be of value, but if the notice only lists the pen name, it is not of much value. Records of the platform on which a work has been published may help in verifying the identity of the author. So may the testimony of others who saw or read the work, or who were told about it by the author. An author's own copies may be of value, if they carry a timestamp, as computer files generally do. But computer timestamps are not usually secure. Timestamps on email generally are reasonably secure, and could establish that the content existed and had been transmitted on a specified date by a specified person. But none of this will matter unless the defendant claims that the plaintiff is lying in claiming authorship. Unless that happens, the plaintiff's testimony will usually settle the matter. A person whose work seems to have been infringed would usually be wise to consult a lawyer with experience in copyright suits. Such a lawyer could advise if it is wise to bring suit at all, and if it is, what evidence will probably be needed.
The only real recourse you have is to contact the webhost and try to convince them your content is really yours and file a DMCA Takedown request. How you convince them might be an issue; do you have any old screenshots? Original photos? Any proof that the content and photos are yours? The webhost appears to be https://datacamp.co.uk/ , unless the DNS is being proxied, since DNS points to CloudDNS https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=dns:marksmayo.com NZ and UK are members of the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, so there don't appear to be any arguments about not applying copyright law. You willingly gave up the domain, so you have no recourse or valid reason to try and regain ownership of the domain. You could try and contact the new owner of the domain by filing a complaint via the abuse email listed by the domain registar at https://www.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?&amp;domain=marksmayo.com But they may not do anything, even if you can prove a copyright violation, since they only handle the domain registration and not the webhosting. How they got the content is another question: who was your webhost when you owned the site? Datacamp? Did they not delete it when you closed your account? How did the new owner come to get it?
Not that I am aware of. A person who 'owns' a domain is entitled to utilize that domain including for the purposes of receiving emails. With physical mail, it is a crime in most countries to intentionally interfere with mail that is not addressed to you. For example - Australia. However, this is statute law and as such does not extend to emails - even if it did, if you own the domain then you are the person to whom it was addressed. I note that you seem to misunderstand "confidential" - this only arises in the context of a special relationship between the person transmitting the information and the person receiving it. Usually this is a contractual obligation between A and B but it can be imposed by law (e.g. doctor-patient, banker-client, lawyer-client, GDPR etc.). If A sends confidential (as between A &amp; B) information to C, C is under no general obligation to keep it confidential if C has no relationship of confidentiality with A or B. If C discloses it and B suffers damage, B sues A for breach of confidence (or the government prosecutes A for breaking the law); B has no case against C. For your situation, where B has allowed A to send the information to an obsolete address then B has contributed to the breach to an extent that B would be extremely unlikely to succeed in a suit against A.