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EFA Claims No Illegal Material On mp3s4free.net
An anonymous reader writes "Electronic Frontiers Australia (www.efa.org.au) claims that the raids organized by the music industry on mp3s4free.net have come up with nothing. Only links to other sites and not copyrighted material have been found.
The music industry is now saying that just
linking is in itself illegal. This does not appear to be supported by Australian law." Update: 10/29 15:26 GMT by T : This story originally referred to "mp3s4free.com," while it should have said -- and has been corrected to read -- "mp3s4free.net."
I would hardly equate downloading music with drug pushing. That's the sort of FUD that got the DMCA and PATRIOT Acts passed in this country. Don't be so quick to piss away your rights.
blog
If Australian law is anything like US law, in order to obtain a search warrant the lawyers for the music industry had to provide affidavits to the court giving their reasons to believe that the web site contained infringing material. Since the site in fact contains only links, either they lied in their affidavits, which would be both perjury and a fraud upon the court, or they didn't even bother to look at the site, which would be grossly negligent.
Am I missing something, or are they in very deep legal trouble?
While I agree there are moral implications beyond the law (law != morality is one of the first things you learn in legal units), you analogy is somewhat flawed in that buying drugs is an offence (depending on substance and jurisdiction) mainly because of the harm it causes to the user. I've yet to hear of anyone suffering chronic psychosis from listening to illicitly copied MP3s (though I could probably see it happening with some of today's more popular artists)...
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
Linking per se is not illegal, but linking to infringing material will be, especially when you have reasonable belief that the material is illegal.
In the case of google or a search engine, they have a good defence: file a DMCA take down notice to have the infringing material unlinked. It is unreasonable to expect that google would self-police their content, it's just intractible.
But when you have a site set up, specifically to provide references to infringing material, largely for the purpose of allowing people to access that material, then I'm afraid you probably don't have a strong case. It's already looking bad "in principle", despite any technical issues.
Attempting to "beat the system" by using this approach is really not the way forward for any advocacy over rights. It's effectively trying to cheat around the technical points while in principle supporting copyright infringement.
The other thing is, when someone mentions how much better life would be without those annoying creditors, and you mention your neighbour Freddie the Knife, there is presumed a specific intent in the initial act and response.
I think they're trying to imply that a pageful of deliberately-aggregated links is exactly the same sort of criminal intent and participation. But what about search engines? the user inputs a parameter ("hitman") and out comes the desired, ah, hit ("Freddie the Knife", "Guido the Strangler", etc). In fairness in the light of the first example, the search engine would have to be indicted on a co-conspiracy charge, just for providing the links.
And such an insanity has no logical stopping point. Pretty soon the coder who wrote the search engine is in the shit for aiding and abetting... the bandwidth provider for providing the access channel... glah. My brain hurts.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I would think that sites like this would be to the advantage of the music industry. Don't bother going after the site, just go after all the links to illegal music that they have ever so nicely collected for you.
kiwi
The Dutch judge dismissed the claim, and showed a thorough insight in the technical side of the matter in the summation.
Mazur.
The truth shall make you fret. (Ankh-Morpork tImes motto)
It's not a completely insane analogy. Both drug dealing and downloading music happen mainly due to an artificial scarcity due to monopoly/drug war, which causes prices to be far higher than they should be. If prices weren't so high drug dealers wouldn't have the incentive to sell and music downloaders wouldn't have so much incentive to download (without then buying the CD, downloading to get a quick listen doesn't count in my book)