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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."
How far can this go? If you can be guilty for linking to a site, what about linking to a site that links to a site? And so on ... there needs to be a point where you can't be expected to have control.
Life is the sport of champions. Those who lose, die.
Yeah, maybe we all don't think he pirated, but couldn't this still be aiding / abetting? He was encouraging other people to pirate music, and giving them the means to do so.
Some of the judges here have been a little slow on the uptake...the Sony mod-chipping debacle is but one example, as is the whole lack of "fair use" right for electronic works...
Was the man found guilty of linking to a list of pirated mp3s? Or did he link to a site which contained, among a lot of other things, pirated mp3s? In the case of the latter, I don't see how you can argue that he was intending for them to pirate material...
Seriously, has anybody thought about the ramification of this for free speech? The recent debacle with record companies whining about the BBC releasing those free tracks has some echoes of this...
cya, Victor
www.google.com
Search for "Filetype:torrent example album"
Now what i have just done is give people the skill to find their own files and commit copyright infringement or of course search for legal downloads.
What i have just done is far far worse than a guy linking to a few warez sites.
Show a man a download link and he will download one file , Teach him to use google and he can warez himself for life
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
If I were running a search engine company and this started happening on a semi-regular basis, I'd probably say screw it and put up a special page for Australian IPs telling the people they need to do something about their laws. I'll bet if Australia scares off Google people are going to take notice and put some heat on their representatives. I mean come on, even a company the size of Google can't be expected to filter the entire Internet of any possible copyrighted content that is displayed on public web sites.
Why didn't the guy just say that when he posted the link in the first place, there wasn't any pirated material on the site?
I'm pretty sure they would have a hard time proving that the site was illegal at the TIME of posting.
I mean even if the linked text was suspicious, he could have argued that the text of the link was changed AFTER the linking occurred.
Anyone know the statute of limitation on illegal hyperlinking?
God needs to implement HTML tags in life so we can pull a </DUMB PEOPLE> and rid the world of stupid things like this.
So no, Google isn't going to be sued. Why attempt to sue when they can afford decent legal defence?
Google has smart people. Those people are smart enough to know that Google indexes copyrighted material. I could see a lawyer for a major label arguing that Google knows that copyrighted content is indexed on a regular basis - intentional or not Google is helping people find whatever copyrighted material people want to find.
I imagine this would actually be easier to argue in a court than the mentioned case, now that hyperlinking to "bad" sites is a no-no.
Never tell anyone that there are drug dealers in the park down the street, even for their own safety.
You had also better never report a crime to authorities. That is also providing information on how to locate illegal activity.
Someone should print out the web address of a stolen copyrighted work that's freely available online, go into a court house in Australia, and stick it to a bulletin board. Then they should sue the government for hosting that information, citing this case as precedent.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Well, if you pointed out how great the knife was for killing people, had a fingerprint resistant finish, and was hard to find in the river since it wasn't magnetic... you probably would. Kind of like putting a sign over the crowbars that say "Great for breaking into houses! Works as a club in a pinch!!" You are explicitly advertising the illegal uses of your items. That's bad, m'kay?
This guy wasn't linking to the songs to point out that the law was being broken. He was doing it so people could get free music. Slashdot: Pull your head collective heads out of your collective asses. This guy isn't a victim, he's a criminal.
Dont laugh, that is coming. Google already has to filter out stuff for places like germany:
"we cant have nazi stuff available to our citizens... nope... history is bad".
The 'media' is going to destroy what is left of our freespeech.. Its amazing..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I dunno. Didn't China get Microsoft to filter the entire net for them?
NO! Copying files is __not stealing__. Please, understand there is no transfer of an "only copy" when duplicating bits.
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?
What about links to legitimate news sites that happen to run a story on "how easy it is to steal an oldsmobile with a screwdriver" only to see the theft rate of oldsmobiles increaseed sharply in the next 5 days after the article? That happened to my parents some time ago. Now I'd bet a small amount of money that the person who stole their car saw how to do it (in some great detail I might add) on the news. Shouldn't the news station be responsible for that?
The fact that this happened in Australia comforts me slightly, but only slightly. I'm waiting for some RIAA executive to put a bug in a congressman's ear about the same type of thing here. The part that really scares me is things like that can become law easily by tailing it onto the back of some sure-to-pass appropriations bill or other popular piece of legislature....
Which leads me to a slightly offtopic but (IMO) a completely legitimate idea:
Congress should pass a law prohibiting bills from coattail-riding on other unrelated bills. If its important enough to pass a law about, its important enough to deserve its own vote.
Ok, rant over. *whew*
And they said zombies weren't real!
So if you work in a store and sell a killer a knife, without thinking we would murder someone with it, would you be guilty to helping him? I don't think so.
If the killer asked the clerk for a knife that would do the most damage and be the best for killing someone, and that he had all intentions of killing, the clerk (and possibly the store) could be found liable in a civil case.
If this Aussie linked to a site that he did NOT KNOW had copyright infringing material, then he may not be liable, much in the same way that clerk that unknowingly sells a knife to a killer probably wouldn't be found guilty.
Civil court cases are often quite amusing and interesting, as they actually seem to work out the kinks of cases that criminal law couldn't quite cover. Think of OJ Simpson. He may have not been found guilty in a criminal court, but he was found guilty (well, sorta) and liable in a civil case. He didn't serve a prison sentence (you can't, in a civil court), but he sure did need to pay!
I am, however, sort of torn over this ruling. On one side, I see it as a very good case. Whether it's just a link or not, if you're deliberately aiding illegal activity, why shouldn't you be found guilty? On the other hand, in a modern court of law precedence is everything, and this COULD be interpreted as being a big problem for Google etc. In a perfect world, this guy would have been found guilty, and Google would be fine, and know it. But this isn't a perfect world. (Well, actually, in a perfect world this guy wouldn't have committed copyright infringement in the first place...)
Think about it for a while, and you'll probably get your mind all twisted up and confused and probably upset over how the world is far less perfect than even you had imagined. Then, try to make a change. Even a small change. It's good for human well-being and overall advancement.
What if someone links to a site, and later on that site puts up something illegal? Does this mean that I have to monitor my links daily to see whether they're suddenly doing something illegal?
Alternatively, can I get my "referers" in trouble now by posting up mp3s? Ridiculous.
So this Queensland man called attention to websites which provide access to copyright infringing materials and haven't done the necessary steps to prevent the users from actually reaching these.
You can still reach some of the older pages of this mp3s4free website with its links in the internet archive. The internet archive would have taken it off had the Court asked them to do so. They obviously didn't. By making the judgement public the Court (indirectly) advertised the website as one providing (indirect) access to downloadable music hence encouraged people to check it whether they can still reach the the copyright infringing material throught the site via Wayback. Thus Federal Court Justice Brian Tamberlin should be sued for the same reasons he sentenced this guy. (If it is a question whether the Court should have heard about this widely known technology it also needs to be a question whether this guy should have heard about the widely known technology of clicking on hyperlinks. Who draws the boundaries of "widely known"?)
BTW the Catholic church have seen this problem few hundred years back when they included the title of the Index - the book containing the titles of forbidden books - within the Index.
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
The 2600 case?
d raws_supreme_court_appeal/
h ttp://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ >
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/04/2600_with
If you're a hacker magazine, you can't even describe how people can find DeCSS via search engines.
But if you're a professor trying to make a point, you can host DeCSS itself. ahref=http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/