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

The linking is in itself illegal?

[Empiric]

Yes! Google, I have you now...

RTFA

[Texas Rose on Lava L]

It's mp3s4free.net, not mp3s4free.com.

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:Pull the other one - it has bells on it

[lafiel]

Surely this is like hosting a list of places you can buy illicit drugs. You do not actually possess said drugs, but you are party and complicit in assisting access to illegal materials.

Does this mean linking a site with links to illegal material is also a crime? Where does it stop? A link of a link of a link? Can you prove that they were purposely attempting to provide aid to gain illegal material?

Your analogy is harsh, your logic surely missing a couple key points. Assisting access to illegal materials requires proof. At least some sort of proof that they were purposely providing aid for illegal services.

To use your brutal analogy. You can't pay your tutition. An old friend lends you a couple hundred that you'll pay back. Later you tell your best friend about this great loaner. Your best friend goes to 'loaner', who ends up being a crack dealer. You are the link. Are you guilty?

This would be one hell of a brutal world if intent is no longer required to be proven.

Re:Linking should and shouldn't be illegal

[surprise_audit]

Take it a step further - turn yourself in for living next door to Fred-the-hitman. You're obviously "linked" to him by virtue of living in the same building (apartment block) or on the same street (separate houses). If enough people did that, maybe the police/courts would get the message that some level of linking is ridiculous.

Note: You might want to make sure the police/judge have some sense of humour before trying it.

"Linking Is Bad" is BAD thinking

[IBitOBear]

Consider the chilling (abbusable) effect of making linking illegal or conspiritorial act.

You have a problem with a person or organization. You link to their site as an example of the problem you have with them. (Say you link to the Debold site because they are "election fraudsters".)

If your problem is that they can (a) persue you because you linked to their stuff or (b) change the page you innocently linked to to an infringing content site (you infringe their content, but they don't, so clearly you meant others to infringe their property.)

Plus there is a proof-by-induction problem. You link to a friends page because you like him. Unbenonst to you, he links to infringing material. An over-zealous RIAA decides that the "only possible reason" for you to have linked to such a malcontent was that you must share his every view.

How many link steps does it take to wash an outgoing link?

Suppose you have a bunch of links lying fallow on your friends page that you haven't bothered to clean out for a while. A new user takes over an old firends equally fallow account and posts kiddie porn. Your link reads (and always had read) something innocent like "A young lady who's company I enjoy" but "margrets-life.com" now takes you to naughty-margret the hottest little 12 year old in siagon...

Its a mire.

You sould be able to link to anything. Essentially when you link you are in a crowded stadium and you are pointing your finger across the crowded field (at a possible stranger). Such pointing should not make you responsible for the actions of the person you are pointing at.

Its just too much "who guesses what whom intended where? We'll let the prosicutor who is up for reelection decided... he should be impartial..."

(And yes, this goes for a link that says "crack and murder-for-hire at franks house" because when you wrote it, it might have been a joke. How do you *really know* what frank does in his off time anyway?)

Don't sacrafice your life on the alter of "seeming reasonable".

Re:Linking should and shouldn't be illegal

[flamingmoose]

"Freddie the Knife", "Guido the Strangler", etc

You left out Jack the Ripper. Both a dangerous killer AND a distributor of illegaly encoded music.

How are links different from citations?

[dpbsmith]

I don't get it.

Am I infringing copyright if I say "Leopold Stokowski and Mickey Mouse shake hands in Walt Disney's Fantasia?"

Am I committing an indecency if I say "Grove Press created a sensation when they published Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer?"

Am I committing a terrorist act if I say "Nuclear weapons information which the government, in the eighties, claimed was classified, appears in the Encyclopedia Americana?"

I don't think so.