Dangerous Ruling In Germany Makes Domain Registrar Liable For Copyright Infringement On Website It Registered

We already find the concept of "secondary liability" when it comes to copyright troubling enough. It's worrisome when a third party who had no direct involvement in the actual infringement can be blamed for it. Yet, in the legacy entertainment industry's insane infatuation with stopping all infringement, they keep going further up the chain, past secondary liability into tertiary or possibly even quaternary liability -- blaming those further and further removed from the actual infringement. That includes going after companies like ad providers and search engines -- but also, apparently, it includes going after registrars. We've seen some of this recently in various attempts to target registrars, but a ruling in Germany is hugely troubling, finding a registrar guilty because a site registered through that registrar was apparently used by someone to infringe.

Let's be clear just how far this is removed from the actual infringement. The infringement, if it actually existed, was between two or more individuals, who shared a torrent of Robin Thicke's album Blurred Lines. Once removed from that was the torrent site H33T, which did not actually engage in any infringement, but hosted the torrent (which, again, is not the actually infringing file). Another layer removed from that would be H33T's web host. And then we go one more layer up, and we finally get to Key-Systems, the registrar, which was ordered by a court to stop the infringement all those many layers down. And, of course, as the registrar, its only option was to yank the DNS entry, which it did, shutting down the entire site, even if everything else on the site was legal.