Slashdot Mirror
Norwegian Student Ordered to Pay for Hyperlinks to Music
Stephan writes "The AP reports that Norway's Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a student whose Napster.no homepage (no relation to the U.S. Napster, apparently) had links to free Internet music files must compensate the music industry. The around 170 links to mp3s will cost its creator $15,900. In a summary of its ruling, the supreme court said the music was clearly published in violation of copyright law. An unofficial English translation of the Court of Appeal decision (earlier in the case) provided by the lawyer of the defendant and more information on the case can be found at the Links &
Law Website."
I thought, one was not legally responsible for content linked to and provided by others.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
$15,900 fine / 170 songs = $93.52~
That's one expensive song. Almost makes iTunes seem worthwhile.
-Teiresias
...Kim Possible
Last night's episode on The Disney Channel, showed how our hero Kim resisted peer pressure to download music without paying for it.
Kim told her new friend that she "wasn't afraid, she just knew the difference between right and wrong".
Way to go Disney! Being pro-active and teaching our children to repect the RIAA.
Huh?
An analogy is intended to clarify the situation. What you've done is created a overcomplicated contrived situation as an attempt to prove an assumed argument.
An analogy - in general - can't be used to prove anything because it is by it's nature a metaphor. i.e. a different situation.
He linked to the files knowing they were illegal, and in doing so provided a mechanism for others to download them. He was facilitating copyright infringement. A link is more than just a line of text. It is a functional component of the internet.
But so far, they haven't done much to earn that public's respect.
A more common scenario - A junkie tells a fellow junkhead where to score drugs. Should he be charged under minimum sentencing guidelines for selling drugs?
i don't think so. google is a general search - even if sites with illegal mp3s come up, it's not deliberate, with "malicious" intent. by having a linked page for specifically for music, i don't think there's much debate on what the intent of the page was.
a bad analogy, perhaps, but if a guy publishes a list of contacts for pedophiles to identify families with children, i think thats' a crime. general purpose telephone book that could be mined by users to accomplish the same thing isn't liable the same way, no?
The world wide web is named for its nature of being connected through links. It just doesn't seem quite 'fair' to only prosecute one person in the chain or web for linking. One might argue that you can take down the 'source,' effectively breaking the chain. But by this reasoning, the distributors of the media should be the ones prosecuted; not any linking sites. Search engines such as Yahoo or Google definately become an issue. Napster(the filesharing service) had a search engine..
Please report immediately to the nearest termination center.
Yes, linking to the data and not hosting it should still be a crime.
Consider the analagous crime of being the driver for a bank robbery. Sure, you aren't robbing the bank. But enabling others to perpetrate a crime is a crime.
One more example: Let's say you have some friends who happen to sell illegal drugs. You want to help them out, so you go around advertising their wares for them, telling people where to go to pick it up, etc. You are now part of the consortium selling the drugs.
So, what if I said, out loud, in the presence of witnesses, the IP address of a site where one can possibly download a song someone claims is copyrighted. Would that be infringement? What if I wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to someone? Put it on a poster and put it on a wall? Wrote it on a wall? What if I published the address in a blog? How about a letter to a friend? How about printing it in a magazine? A newspaper? TV show? Radio program?
If it's infringement for one, it's infringement for all. If so, commercial law triumphs basic freedom to speak. The commerce-based society Poul and Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants" has finally come to pass, where CC -- Commercial Crime --becomes the most heinous, unspeakable thing an individual can commit.
Quite true. In fact, you don't necessarily have to work with the RIAA in order to reward artists.
I'd like to see an effective peer to peer system that uses a donation-weighed upload/download ratio. I.e., the ratio of how much data you have to upload to how much data you have to download is set at something like (TheirContribution + X)/(YourContribution + X), where X is an amount designed so that freeloaders can download as well at a reduced rate, to encourage those not even willing to cough up a few bucks not to go off and start their own network. The only centralized component would need to be the contribution server, which is informed how many times a file is downloaded; rewards to copyright owners are paid out on a slightly progressive scale based on completed downloads to different IPs. Files can be user-moderated to determine owner (i.e., everyone gets to vote), and this can be overridden at the central server for anyone who can successfully demonstrate copyright ownership. Should the central server go down, the network should be designed to put everyone on equal footing until it comes back up.
Consequently, the recording industry would have no incentive to take down the centralized server, because it would only hurt them. The network would keep going, but they would cease getting payment. And new artists could get their names out there and get rewarded for it without having to sign over their works to a label. If you have a hard-to-attack, reliable system (such as a spoofed or proxied kademlia network), they'd have little choice but to work with it.
We also have a halon fire extinguisher. Its always nice to have a fire extinguisher that kills people around.
Again, it is the legwork portion of the equation that got him in trouble. You are just talking, writing, whatever. You aren't going out of your way to deliberately facilitate an illegal action. Whether or not the action should be illegal is irrelavent.
"If I say "they have some music for dl over at acme.com", I am likewise not committing a crime, I don't care which legal statutes you judge it under."
That's right, in fact it was exactly my point. Not sure what the contention is there.
"this simply holds no water"
Actually if you re-read the title of the article then you might notice that it does. Free speech is not the right to say anything you want anytime you want, we learn this in junior high school. Slow down in your rush to argue and think this all through, and if you have a counter-arguement then fine, I'm all ears. At the very least don't quote my own arguments back to me.
This is just an example of legal systems catching up with the undeveloped land that is the Internet.
.mpg:
p g;
.mpg with a copyrighted one, the link is functionally the same as the proscribed ones in this case, but the intent is committed by somebody else - the server administrator, without your knowledge. It's possible that it could be argued that you are under a duty of care to ensure your links go to where you think they go. That would get interesting, and examine the trust realtionship between you and the sites you link to. All theoretical, of course, and fun for a lawyers moot.
This ruling doesn't make linking illegal. As ever, what is being determined by the courts is the intention of the person committing the allegedly criminal act. If the intention is criminal, then you are guilty.
This also shows that there are differences between what is legal, logical, moral, and just. From one point of view, it is illogical that a mechanism (linking) is subject to criminal sanction at some times, and not at others - but it just shows you have to look outside the plain mechanism. In this case, it was not legal to link to these files.
Now there are crimes that are punished despite intent - such as speeding (many people punished don't intend to speed, but have done so - and get punished).
Of course, there are variations on linking that are yet to be tested by the courts. If you link to the public domain
http://snowwhiteserver.invalid/innocuous-file.m
then the server administrator replaces that
The 'net is growing up. Is is morally correct to aid people committing an offence - such as copyright violation - even if you disagree with the copyright laws? Is it just? Logical? Legal?
IANAL
There's actually nothing in the US statutes about contributory and vicarious infringement (which are separate concepts). They were invented by the courts in order to help out Jack Valenti and company.
But this case was in Norway, so that's not really relevant.
but just putting online the url as plain text? wouldn't that be freedom of speech?
You know, my first reflex when reading this story was the Slashdot mob mentality: "He was only linking!"
But after reading the replies to this post, I had a change of heart. To steal one of the badly-construdted, not-really-applicable real-life analogies from this story, let's say I was pointing people to a computer store selling illegal MP3's. Telling one person isn't illegal, but realistically neither is giving a friend a link to an MP3 file. Putting up a billboard, or a large website with a search engine, however, is reaching the point of illegality. IANAL, but doing this on a large scale is like being an accomplice.
An equal analogy for why search engines aren't exempt is that if I advertise such a store in the back of a computer magazine, and the magazine doesn't know, it's a problem. Basically, as I see it, if you set up a "trading ground" for P2P and knowingly allow it to distribute copyrighted content without trying to stop it, you're doing something wrong. A simple message like "iTunes is for legal and rightholder-authorized sharing only. Don't steal music." is enough, I think--there's not much more you can do than ask users.
Random idea: if two people separately post two files that, when XOR'ed together, produce copyrighted music, can either be sued?
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What about this: What if I put up a website dedicated to aid in tracking down copyright infringers? People who noticed a site hosting copyright infringing material could write a short report consisting of the host website and a link to the infringing material as proof. Then, they wait for the police to take down the infringing websites. And if other people happen to use my website to download illegal content, would it still be my fault? After all, the website is just there to aid global law enforcement.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Try this one
You stand all day on the street corner and direct people to different locations for different people and locations depending on the drug or illegal item they want to buy.
At least take the analogy all the way through. In your example it would be as if somebody e-mailed a link to a friend to get the content rather than publishing a list of links all to infringed content.
I am not sure what movement you refer to, but the one I consider myself being a part of has completely different motivation. We do believe that there is no such thing as "intellectual property" not on legal grounds but on moral and phillosophical ones. In other words, the "Intellectual Property" "laws" are nothing but a conspiracy by a cabal of crooks and idiots aimed to entrich themselves at the expense of the entire human race. Thus the analogies you mentioned are only used to illustrate utter ridiculousness of the entire idea of "intellectual property", and by extension any "laws" drafted to protect the insane thing. This technique, to demonstrate idiocy masquarading as wisdom by wrapping itself in semi-plausible complexity, is ancient and has even a latin name originating from ancient Rome, it is called "reductio ad absurdum".
People constantly scream about how 'copying isn't stealing' and these computer and Internet processes are unique and are misunderstood and not realistically covered under conventional laws: Well guess what guys, this is why all of your analogies aren't worth they time spent typing them out, because the other side realises this also, and hence why these decisions for modern-day technologies are different when put in a traditional environment.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only we do not claim that Internet is "unique" and "misunderstood" but we claim the exact opposite: that the concepts of "property" and "stealing" are ancient and immutable, being the very foundation of our branch of human civilizations, and thus are not subject of being mutated and transformed at a whim of a current crew of greed-worshippers just because they happen to use new technology to get rich. While we claim that one can only steal physical property, it is they who claim that the concept of stealing is a quaint little old thing and needs to be "updated" to include puffs of electrons and sequences of integer numbers. The fact that these decisions go against us have far more to do with victories of corporate globalization and establishment of permanent strata of corporate masters and overlords, whose "laws" superceed those "obsolete" ideals like freedom of thought and commerce.