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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."
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.
> 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?