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."

Comments

Re:Pull the other one - it has bells on it

[brianosaurus]

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.

Australian raids on link site

[belmolis]

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?

Re:Linking should and shouldn't be illegal

[Reziac]

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.