UK Supreme Court Agrees Viewing Webpages is Not Copyright Infringement

Can you commit copyright infringement (piracy) simply by viewing web-pages on a website? Five judges at the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom have this week ruled to protect millions of innocent internet users from incurring unfair civil liability for merely coming upon a web-page that happens to contain copyright material.

The concern centres on how website browsers, such as Firefox, Chrome, Opera and MS Internet Explorer (among many others), tend to save temporary copies of the pages (cache) you visit online to your computers storage (hard disk). This is done for a number of reasons, such as to speed up future browsing of the same content and to lower strain on the remote web server. It is a common practice for almost all browsers and in fact it would be difficult to show a webpage without it.

In reality most websites contain copyright material (e.g. the ISPreview.co.uk logo) but it would be absurd to accuse website visitors of copyright infringement just because their web browser has quietly cached some of this content.

Never the less an organization that monitors news coverage on behalf of its clients had sought, through an appeal, clarity over whether or not the content that is saved to your computer should be subject to a licence from the relevant rights holder. The court mercifully ruled that making such temporary copies was an “integral and essential part of a technological process“.

Supreme Court Statement by Lord Sumption

“In the first place, article 5.1 is an exception to the copyright owner’s right to control the reproduction of his work. It necessarily operates to authorise certain copying which would otherwise be an infringement of the copyright owner’s rights.

Secondly, it has never been an infringement, in either English or EU law, for a person merely to view or read an infringing article in physical form. This state of affairs, which is recognised in the enumeration of the copyright owner’s rights in articles 2, 3 and 4 of the Directive, has never been thought inconsistent with a high level of protection for intellectual property.

All that article 5.1 of the Directive achieves is to treat the viewing of copyright material on the internet in the same way as its viewing in physical form, notwithstanding that the technical processes involved incidentally include the making of temporary copies within the electronic equipment employed.

Third, if it is an infringement merely to view copyright material, without downloading or printing out, then those who browse the internet are likely unintentionally to incur civil liability, at least in principle, by merely coming upon a web-page containing copyright material in the course of browsing. This seems an unacceptable result, which would make infringers of many millions of ordinary users of the internet across the EU who use browsers and search engines for private as well as commercial purposes.”

The appeal raised a critical question about the application of copyright law to the technical processes involved in viewing copyright material on the internet, which is important because it is still considered an “infringement to make or distribute copies or adaptations of a protected work“.

In law a person who reads a pirated copy of a protected book or views a forgery of a protected painting “commits no infringement“, while the person who sold the book or forged the painting may do. In other words the court ruled that it’s fine for your web browser to cache content but downloading and redistributing it, such as through another medium like email, could potentially still be a problem.

Unfortunately the Supreme Court’s ruling is somewhat provisional and as a result the case has been referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for a preliminary ruling so that “the critical point may be resolved in a manner which will apply uniformly across the European Union“.