Hallo SWINOGer
I hope, you’re enjoying already the holidays somewhere around.
We’re having here a little difficulties with a german lawyer. We’re offering shared hosting services. One of our customers is sharing links to uploaded.net, which contains music, which might be copyright protected.
Question to the community:
1. What are you doing in such situations? (Yes, appart from contact your lawyer ;-) ).
Assuming you are in Switzerland they can decide whatever they want in germany according to german law but if they want to enforce it, then they have to ask for help from the swiss authorities (Rechtshilfeverfahren). However the swiss side would only provide help if the request would be valid under swiss law as well.
In other words, you can simply sit back and wait until a swiss judge asks you to provide the information. Then you are safe as you only followed what a swiss court has ruled. Otherwise you risk of giving out information whereas your customer could sue you because under swiss law you are not allowed to give it out.
The only exception would probably if there is imminent danger which requires immediate action to prevent severe damage.
The more interesting question in this judgment from 2011(so already 3 years old, do you have that old logs) is that they talk about copyright infringement. However linking to a download page can not be considered illegal as downloading copyrighted content is not illegal neither under swiss law. Only providing the download (uploading of the content, not a link to content) is considered illegal.
2. Did you have similar issues and how did you handle them?
Not directly that way but, yes. Let the police "work it out" between them. As a swiss entity you are obliged to follow swiss laws and nothing else.
otherwhise we would have tons of DCMA court cases here. The only thing I usually see is some "Lawyers" (in big quotes) trying to intimidate the end user to try to stop what they think is piracy. MPAA pays millions and millions for this with no result (accoring to the Sony leaks...). I would not worry until the swiss police asks you the information with a court order according to swiss law.
If you still have the information after that many years is then another story.
I wish you merry Christmas and a happy new year.
kind regards
Pascal Wagenhofer
Technical Services
Q-X GmbH
Schmittestrasse 5
Postfach 61
CH-8308 Illnau / Switzerland
Phone 0840 11 11 10 (International +41 840 11 11 10) (Lokaltarif)
Fax 0840 22 22 20 (International +41 840 22 22 20) (Lokaltarif)
Andreas Fink
CEO DataCell ehf
CEO Backbone ehf
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