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Aussie Students Face Jail Over Music Sharing Site
An anonymous reader writes "SMH this morning is reporting that three uni students may be jailed for their creation of a music sharing web site. Ok, piracy is not a good thing, but jail is just a tad extreme, don't you think? I hope ARIA (Australian version of RIAA) are pleased with themselves. What burns me about this article is the quote: 'Counsel for the Commonwealth, Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."'
Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
For sure. Open source software licensing, music sharing for free - fricking communists! They should all be locked up.
Anyone ever seen "Born Yesterday"? Great line from that movie that applies here:
"I want EVERYONE to be smart. A world full of
ignorance is too dangerous to live in."
I hate stupid people.
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"Will the highways on the Internet become more few?" --George W. Bush, in Jan. 2000
What burns me about this article is the quote: 'Counsel for the Commonwealth, Paul Roberts, SC, said Ng was well aware he was acting illegally. Not only was the site camouflaged - the web space had been let to him by a teenage boy in Perth - but Ng had co-written an essay for his information technology law course on "open source software licensing."' Not entirely sure what OS licensing has to do with music piracy."
Obviously anyone that chooses to write an essay for an information technology law course on "open source software licensing" knows at least SOMETHING about copyright. Such as, for instance, the fact that there is a such a thing as copyright law and that freely trading copyrighted material might violate it.
That quote had nothing to do with insulting your precious open source sensitivities. It was about an information technology law student obviously knowing when he's breaking copyright laws on a computer.
Look, for every other crime, you do time in jail. Why should copyright infringement be any different? This is nothing other than the willful violation of copyright laws. A service with no other reasonable purpose than breaking the law should be considered violation of the law, just as someone who had set up an on-line drug trading site would be in violation of drug laws even if they personally weren't selling the crack themselves.
Piracy advocates used to say that there is no alternative to piracy, that there is nowhere else to get music online. Thats not true now; with the success of anti-piracy enforcement, there is a flourishing legal online music marketplace, and everyone should realize that if this new business horizon is to be truly successful, the illegal alternative must be suppressed.
Reminds me of what USA citizens might face if they were to (gasp) post a link to the Paris Hilton movie (Freenet: CHK@qGlSiCK3HPMx38fCuSPlo81ws2AMAwI,LRhfAE-DMDcsnr QhkXEiBw/parissexmovie_256k.wmv).
It may seem off-topic, but it isn't, really. A movie was filmed consensually. It's being distributed - with disregard to any possible copyright - by one of the involved parties. And the other party involved is threatening lawsuits six ways from Sunday. Pot, kettle, black... You performed a work, you knew it was being recorded, you're well aware of this whole new-fangled "internet" thing, why is it someone else's fault when things start getting distributed? To be honest, the parallel between the Hilton tape and every MP3 out there is quite clear.
I'm disappointed to see that yet more college kids are facing punishment for writing what amounts to essentially an indexing service, but here in the US, that seems to be the status quo. As in, he who has the status, has the quo.
The RIAA is winning because they have money. The ARIA will win for the same reasons. It sucks, really.
He may have been technically aware that what he was doing was illegal. But it is still a matter of opinion.
If you friend says to you "could you lend me that Cd you just bought". would you say "no, its against the law, you criminal"? I dont think he would be your friend if you did say that often.
The point i am trying to make is that, he may not have seen it as a breach of the law. Music pirates are often seen as people who copy CDs and music and sell them on at a profit.
"These guys didnt make a penny (or so i believe), so they cannot be criminals."
given the effort that is going into anonymous (sp?) trading P2P systems, it seems amazing that there are still sites out there that host MP3s that are not squeaky clean.
/.er when it comes to the RIAA / ARIA / "assorted recording acronym", but these guys were painting a large target on their foreheads and saying "come and get us".
I have as big a chip on my shoulder as the next
Jail is over the top, but if you wanted to get away with doing dodgy things, these guys failed miserably.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
> the music industry alleges the pirated music cost
... - if so, that's hardly the fault of Mr Ng and his cohorts.
> it at least $60 million
That's one f*ck of a lot of Kylie!
Let's do a bit of maths on this. A CD in Australia costs around $20-25. Let's round this up to $30, to give ARIA the benefit of the doubt.
An average CD contains about 10 tracks.
I'm going to assume that ARIA used something resembling base-10 mathematics... $60 mill equates to 2 million CDs, or 20 million tracks worth of downloads.
That's one track for every person in Australia.
Let's further assume that each track was a 3Mb MP3 file, which is probably a bit on the low side. The 20 million tracks that were downloaded works out to about 60Tb of data.
Are we supposed to believe that these guys, using a site running from a suburban bedroom, managed to share 60Tb of data? **Maybe** ARIA's lawyer is assuming that each track that was downloaded from this site was copied to another 10 sites, and from each of these to another 10,
Does anyone have any more info on this case? Preferably, something a bit more credible?
That depends where you are in Texas.
In my county, you might be the only inmate.
A friend of mine spent 30 days in jail once back in the late 70s.
When his father needed him to drive a tractor, the sheriff would turn him loose for the day in the custody of his father. At the end of the day, his father would take him back.
They'd also let him out to rake the leaves of the courthouse lawn or to run down to the drugstore for a hamburger or a book to read.
One Saturday night, someone booked for drinking and driving, public intoxication, or something like that broke his tv set. He was a bit ticked off that the sheriff wouldn't let him out for a little while on Monday to go buy another tv set.
I agree the argument is flawed.
Your statement that there are 1000$ worth of "pirated" pieces of music on their computer is correct. But assume that 1000 people (illegally!) download 100 of those songs each. What is the theoretical damage to the music industry?
1000x100x1$ = 100000$, so we are theoretically not talking about petty crimes here.