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Australian Man Found Guilty for Hyperlinking
An anonymous reader writes "Major record labels are celebrating in Sydney, Australia today. It took almost two years but they've finally won a legal battle against a Queensland man and his ISP for alleged music piracy. Amazingly, Stephen Cooper didn't even have to host the alleged pirated files. All he did (allegedly) was to hyperlink to a few sites that had infringing sound recordings. His ISP didn't escape either. Even the ISP's parent company got sued. No jail time but all parties will have to pay costs."
to put it politely... just too stupid for words... how, exactly, did he "pirate" the works in question??? Looks like we need to slap some judges upside the head with a cluestick... Google et al, had better watch out... they'll now have to filter out possible copyrighted works in any links produced in searches... this is a very dangerours legal ruling.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
You know, google hyperlinks to a whole lot of sites, someone in austrailia should start suing them over it too.
Google, for linking to illegal music, texts, pictures and videos...
This seems a bit broken... I mean, If I tell someone that someone *over there* is a drug dealer, do I get arrested? How can he be held responsible for the content of other sites?
...while wearing a shirt that said "car for sale".
Not quite. Napster actually hosted the files.
Cooper and is about as guilty as the guy who says to you, "Just ask for Stan. He'll hook you up with some good stuff." And his ISP is about as guilty as the landlord of the guy.
Whether that actually means the parties are guilty or not depends heavily on local laws.
Yeah, mp3s are all illegal. And what else do you expect to happen when you host a site named "mp3s4free"?
"Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
Frankly, the guy deserved it. mp3s4free.com was created solely to link to unauthorised copyrighted material, and for the purpose of boosting traffic on the ISP. That (summarised by me) was the courts finding.
The article doesn't make clear whether it boiled down to intent. I hope that the finding was because he intended to link to the material - such a finding would protect those who inadvertantly had dodgy links (such as chat room hosts, etc...). If the finding sets a precedent that anyone hosting hyperlinks to infringing material, without intent, is a criminal, then that is a bad thing.
Some have said that this is akin to being arrested for pointing to a drug dealer. Rubbish. It's more like running a bulletin board, the sole purpose of which is for dealers to list their contact details, and available drugs.
I don't know about Australian law, but here in the UK if you were to point at a car and suggest to someone "Hey, steal that one." you'd be up for a conspiracy charge.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
If he was found guilty, then the charges are proven. They are no longer alleged.
Err... the charges are proven from the court's perspective. The submitter apparently doesn't agree with the court, and so for him/her the charges are still alleged.
From a user's perspective, a site with links to pirated files is the same as a site with pirated files. If I say click here to download Star Wars RotS, it doesn't matter where the file is located...I've enabled piracy. Obviously that was this guys intention.
What if I create a web site called www.stolencreditcardnumbers.com, and using DHTML or PHP, list credit card numbers from some other source (a cracked bank site say, or someone who has a bunch of stolen numbers), shouldn't I face some kind of penalty for that.
This has nothing to do with "Your Rights Online," by the way. Stealing is a crime. Aiding someone in the commission of a crime is also a crime. Criminals should be caught, stopped and punished.
What he was doing is not like pointing to a stolen car, it's more like he was standing there opening the door to the car for people that came up to him.
It's more like a man in Queensland was found guilty of pointing at the keys to a stolen car in the street, thus assisting in committing a crime.
Having read about this case, the person in question was linking to the site with the intention of showing people where to get pirated materials from.
I'm not saying it should be illegal, but this is clearly different from either a) automated searching (like google) or b) linking to a site which happens to also contain pirated material.
Should it be illegal to tell people "Hey, you want some pirated stuff? He has it, that guy over there!". I'm not sure, but that is what this case rests on.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
I doubt it works the same everywhere, but in the US courts never prove someones innocence.
Wouldn't want THIS to happen, would we?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This is somewhat a misnomer. Many crimes can be set up in such a way to implicate an innocent person. When this innocent person is convicted because all (or most / the most influential) the evidence points to him, does this still mean that it is "proven" that he did it? In the same instance, what happens when a criminal gets caught red handed doing something, but because of a foulup in following procedures the criminal actually gets off. Does this mean that the criminal has been "proven" to not have committed the crime?
In all cases, any judgement is based upon the 'evidence' at hand... in some cases not all 'evidence' is actually admitted for one reason or another as well as the occasion where irrelevant / false 'evidence' is actually admitted into the case. At best, a verdict can be considered a very educated hypothesis.
Proven implies that the judgement is made upon facts that are incontrovertible... like the fact that 1 + 1 = 2, arithmetically speaking. Since the vast majority of 'evidence' submitted to the court rarely fits this criteria, there almost always exists room (even inside the room of "without reasonable doubt") for the verdict to be flawed.
Therefore, it would still be correct to consider the crimes alleged even when a person if "found guilty" of committing them.
I am here in the UK.
And note the use of "stolen" vs "to be stolen".
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Lucky for us, at least in this country (US), the # of innocent people being convicted of crimes is remarkably low. And as some have pointed out, just because a verdict is overturned does not mean that someone did not commit the act that they were accused of.
For an example of this, see the recent Washington (State) Supreme Court Ruling where they effectively created a legal meaning for innocent whereby a person who was convicted of a crime and later had that verdict thrown out must prove their innocence in order to be able to sue their lawyer for malpractice.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I've seen sites that have links to pages that show you how to draw and quarter a human body. Now IANAL but I'm pretty sure that cutting up a dead body is illegal. Should those sites get dinged as well?
Unless you draw and quarter a major company's CEO with information you found on such a site, the politicians and courts really won't care about it. This is about money, not any moral 'right'.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can point to keys for a car on the street all I want.
This won't become a crime by saying to anyone how easy it is to steal it,
or even saying that you think people SHOULD steal it..
It is NOT the same as ordering someone to steal it.
When I steal your car and drive down the neighborhoods kids, remember, it was your responsibility to keep me out.
I know it's dumb, but it's just like having an open wifi access point. If someone else gets on it, the owner of it is responsible for the content/use.
Really? So the city of Somewhere, USA is responsibile for any criminal use of their free, wireless internet access that they provide to anyone who is within range? Is Kinko's responsible for someone coming in and photocopying pictures of illegal acts or copying copyrighted material? If you decide to leave your keys in your car overnight and someone steals your car and gets a speeding ticket are you going to have to pay the fine?
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
You are lost in a maze of twisty little analogies, all alike.
What it is NOT like is the Ticketmaster decision in the US which ruled that a link is not copyright infringement. I don't think this ruling could stand in the US.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
http://web.archive.org/web/20031010135440/http://w ww.mp3s4free.net/
It is pretty obvious he was acting as a filesharing hub pretty much as Napster did. This was not coincidental linking it was linking to copyright infringed material for the express pursuit of aquiring advertising revenue. He knew exactly what he was doing. No sympathy here.
Again the slashdot moral majority starts having a blabbering fit over thier rights being infringed and all that but this is a pretty simple case. He was actively using his website to encourage a very specifical criminal activity not a few coincidental links in a sea of other detail.
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
If anyone else reads howstuffworks.com, they have several articles on lock picking, safe cracking, and other illegal activities. They describe methods and have 3d visuals to show how to pick a lock, along with linking to sites to get lock picking kits. They have over 1,000 articles in their database on all subjects, but I could see them getting in trouble for hosting this kind of material. The thing that could save them was that at the beginning of the article they said "you should only do this to pick your own lock or crack your own safe." Sierpinski, did the news program say "this is how the criminals do it so you can do it too!", or did it say something like "this is a method of stealing a car"?
The voice of the next generation. "In this tower, in my mind..." Babble - Tower
Unfortunately, When it comes to technology, everything is a double standard. Good point, though.
-gjr
Lucky for us, at least in this country (US), the # of innocent people being convicted of crimes is remarkably low.
That seems a fairly ridiculous statement to make, as it's impossible to determine it one way or the other. Even measuring the number of people subsequently found not-guilty (or acquitted) is hardly likely to be accurate.
Manta
now shouldn't the web archive be sued now? for linking to his site?
and same goes for SLashdot, their now linking to a site which goes directly to the infringing website.
I think perhaps it's time that we all put down our keyboards for a moment and took the time to consider how our user interfaces are perceived by less tech-savvy people... and after considering that, redesigned those interfaces---error messages and all---to be more friendly and actually explain what happened instead of terrorizing our users....
Maybe it's just me....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
while wearing a shirt that said "create a carbon copy of this car and drive it around without the car designers receiving due compensation."
In a locality where doing so would be against the law.
Sigh.
Look. It's an analogy. If you want a more accurate comparison, how about linking to illegal mp3 files from a site called mp3s4free.
Pointing is analogous to linking. It's not the same.
A car is analagous to an mp3 file. It's not the same.
Stealing is analogous to copyright infringement. It's not the same.
This thread is about whether pointing to a crime is in itself a crime. Not whether copying is stealing.
"When this innocent person is convicted because all (or most / the most influential) the evidence points to him, does this still mean that it is "proven" that he did it?"
Yes. No, it doesn't make much sense, but we're talking about LAW here, so let's not expect it to.
"In the same instance, what happens when a criminal gets caught red handed doing something, but because of a foulup in following procedures the criminal actually gets off. Does this mean that the criminal has been "proven" to not have committed the crime?"
Ah, and this betrays your ignorance of the law. No judgement of guilt or innocence is indicated in such cases. They are simply (for all intents and purposes) set aside.
As for the rest of your post, you attempt to argue about semantics, to say essentially, that even in cases of incontrovertible proof, there exists some doubt, so nothing is ever proven in court.
That's what get's modded "insightful" around here.
In the U.S. legal system, "not guilty" != "innocent."
Not guilty means that the prosectution failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Innocent means that you didn't do it. There is a lot of middle ground between "innocent" and "guilty."
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli