Court clears Dutch music search engine of copyright violation

In a case involving the popular web portal Zoekmp3.nl, a Dutch court has ruled that "providing links to an MP3 file did not constitute disclosure or publication of contents according to Dutch copyright law." A lawyer for the portal stated that if the justice system wants to deal with illegal music downloads, they should go after those providing the files and not the search engine.

According to this article, this is the first case in the world involving a search engine that automatically crawls the Internet for files, some of which may infringe upon copyright.