Re: Eh?
"If you would permit an idea like secondary infringement to take hold you introduce a whole lot of vagueness into the system."
Yes, it's incredibly vague, which is why defamation law is a shark tank and hence my comment about "who has the deepest pockets".
Secondary infringement shows up a _lot_ in civil cases.
"Is a journalist infringing when he/she points at the infringement?"
In defamation cases (civil law): absolutely. It's regarded as republishing the defamation and has been ruled as such on several occasions.
Similarly, when a court order orders a particular website be shut down or not mentioned, mentioning or republishing the site puts you in the firing line of the court - _even if you are unaware of the court order_. National jurisdictions are a bit nebulous in this day and age, etc.
In copyright cases, if someone takes that infringing website and republishes the images from it, that would definitely be secondary infringement (the images weren't stolen from the original copyright holder, but they're still copyright violation). The question is whether publishing links to infringing content in a widely read _for_profit_ publication (or website) is the same as the publication publishing them itself.
Even if the publication _isn't_ found to be violating, the way these kind of laws are written it's entirely possible for the company to face a choice of being bankrupted by going along with the charges and getting penalised out the Wazoo or bankrupting itself defending them - bearing in mind that the moment it can't pay its lawyers it will automatically lose the case anyway, but there's NO guarantee that money spent on the defence will be reimbursed if it wins (Pyrric victory).
Again: This kind of case is more about who has the deepest pockets than actual justice or even who's right in law (if you're in the right and you can't afford the lawyers, you're in the wrong anyway)
The thing is, that if the website is found not to be infringing, then all those torrent indexing sites can be argued to not be infringing too (after all, they just publish links). That means the big guns are going to be rolled out to try and ensure that they get their way on the day.