From The Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Is a playlist that allows you to play a publicly available, free, no-registration-required stream on the video app of your choice infringement? The law and common sense say no. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) says yes. They are very wrong.
Here are the basic facts: Pluto TV is a free streaming service that allows you to watch content without registering for an account. Its model is based on making money via ads and the now-ubiquitous collection of user data. While Pluto TV has its own app, it does not encrypt its streams and each show and movie on the service has a findable M3U link. Those links allow other apps to play the streams but, importantly, there is no downloading going on. The links direct to local files and web sources.
As a result, someone was able to make a playlist of Pluto TV links. That playlist allowed users to watch Pluto TV links—with the ads intact—on apps other than Pluto TV’s. The same way you can play a DVD on any player or watch a channel on any TV. All this playlist did was gather publicly available information in one place in a specific order.
The playlists created were then made available in a GitHub repo, which is where the MPA directed their DMCA takedown request. Because the links as compiled were… infringement…somehow.
It isn’t. The information was publicly available from Pluto TV, which has a legal right to broadcast it. Watching the streams via the links on other apps didn’t even remove the ads, so it seems that the theory here is basically that the loss of tracking data is infringement. So privacy is piracy? Even if that isn’t the argument, that’s certainly the effect of this belief.
Using the DMCA in this matter isn’t about infringement. It’s about control. Major rightsholders don’t want you in control of how you consume their media. They want it themselves, so they can nickel and dime every step of the process. Even their “free” content.
Link to the rest at The Electronic Frontier Foundation
A cautionary note here: The general statement that “a list of links to content is not itself a copyright infringement” makes two assumptions that the EFF doesn’t state. And in this shark’s (considerable) experience, a considerable proportion of those “link pages” fail one or both of these assumptions.
• The list of links and the storage of the content are not under common or cooperative control. For example, if PiratesRUs.com has a link site, which links to material at PiratesBUs.com, and the same legal person(s) via a condescendingly-obvious chain of cutouts owns both sites, that’s “common or cooperative control.” So too if there wasn’t common ownership, but it was two college roommates agreeing to divide and conquer.†
• The list of links is to lawful copies, or at least to copies for which the list-maker has no actual or constructive notice are unlawful. And constructive notice is probably enough, as the photograph of an ostrich in the twenty-year-old case (only in the printed Federal Reporter (3d Series), though) In re Aimster Copr. Litig., 334 F.3d 643, 650 (7th Cir. 2003) (Posner, J.) (neither the ostrich nor the photographer is credited) makes all too clear; and Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer Studios, Inc., v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005) confirmed.
Quickly skimming this most-recent iteration of the EFF page indicates that this overgeneralization flaw is distressingly common. Which is not surprising; it’s not that the EFF is evil, it’s that it’s so convinced of its rectitude and the source of all that is evil that all one need do to get a vociferous response from the EFF is say “the MPAA says…” (which has been a problem since the first time this shark encountered the EFF concerning copyright, some time during the twentieth century).
† No, none of this is at all hypothetical — serial numbers have been filed off, but both examples are real and have been across this shark’s desk (this shark filed his first DMCA notice in 1999). Or at least as real as anything relating to piracy, the pseudonymous assertion of a religious obligation to ensure that information that wants to be free can be free, and the sovereign citizen movement can get. (Really.)