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.
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.
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.
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
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.