news Internet Law Enforcement - Domain Registrar role on the web

[News]

Some disturbing legal news out of Germany, courtesy of techdirt: A German appeals court has upheld a copyright infringement ruling against a German domain name registrar (Key Systems) which had issued a domain name to H33t, a “torrent-tracking” site.

This is a new wrinkle in the copyright infringement battles, and one that should have us concerned. The question of “secondary liability” in copyright law – the liability of intermediaries, persons or entities who are not primarily responsible for the infringement but may facilitate it or assist in it in various ways – has been a fierce legal battleground over the last 10 years or so. In the US (and elsewhere) the debate has focused on the liability of website owners/operators: when is, say, YouTube liable for the infringements of its users? And we have (as do the Germans, I believe) a fairly complex series of provisions in our Copyright Act that attempt to navigate this question – providing website operators with a “safe harbor” protecting them from infringement liability if they take certain steps to respond to claims of infringement from copyright holders. [This, as many of you are familiar with, is the "notice-and-takedown" regime in sec. 512 of the Copyright Act].

Full Article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ernet-the-role-of-the-domain-name-registrars/