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."
In Norway at least.
He only provided the links and didn't host any of the files? What a sad day for freedom on the net. Soon it will be a crime to link to bittorrent or eMule's respective homepages.
Will Slashgot get sued linking to a site that link(ed) to MP3's?
And surely search engines do this?
The song he hyperlinked was "bjorgen bjorgen fjorgen djorgen," which everyone knows is the best song on the album and the rest is just filler.
"show me all the blueprint show me all the blueprint show me all the blueprints"
How have I committed a crime?
...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.
You are correct in that the copyright holder has the right to seek compensation for his/her work, but they don't have a right seek it from people who aren't using their work. Imagine getting sued by the RIAA because you told a few friends where they can find a guy selling bootleg CDs... that's just plain stupid. Go after the bootlegger, by all means, but you can't really go after someone for KNOWING the bootlegger; that is frivolous.
Hi,
You would have a valid point if this guy had actually been hosting the content, but he was only LINKING to it. The idea that someone can be held responsible for the contents of pages that he links to can, if adopted by other countries outside of Norway, destroy the very nature of the World Wide Web.
The Web is, at its core, a mesh of interlinked pages. Pages that you control link to pages that you do not control. What if I linked to an innocuous site that was later hijacked and used to host kiddy porn? Should I be arrested? Am I to be held responsible for a site I have no control over changing its content just because I linked to it?
This decision has enormous implications for the future of the Web in Norway, and all of those implications are bad.
We must learn to work with the artists and record industry, along with the movie industry and others, instead of against them.
Why?
Let's say I don't give a shit how much money the RIAA makes, and in fact do not generally support them or their artists because I consider music from independent sources to be superior.
However, I do demand that I have the right to not face legal repercussions for something I type, and I do expect as a customer that if I buy a piece of audio equipment I am not restrained from exercising my fair use rights with it.
I don't see any way to "work with" the RIAA in this situation??
The RIAA has demonstrated they certainly aren't willingly going to compromise in terms of giving up some control over the exact nature of distribution in order to take advantage of new technology; I don't see why I should "compromise" rights I've had since birth so a music cartel whose products I mostly don't like can feel better about themselves. Saying "they have their rights" does not justify that they are using the scapegoat of digital music distribution to lay claim to new and unjust new rights, and you are apologizing for them.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts