Slashdot Mirror
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."
But lose the war..
Morons. It will be a good thing when the war is finally over, and the entire entertainment 'industry' is out of business.
Perhaps then we can line them all up against the wall.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Everyone, please take a deep breath and look at this logically. If you look at the facts of the case, it's not unreasonable at all, and in fact it makes sense. It also does not have the far reaching consequences that people are fearing. Both parties decided to increase site traffic (and therefore earn more $$$) by linking to copyrighted material. Thus they were using un-authorized copyright material to make money. The plantiffs PROVED this to a judge in court. Key points: 1.) They KNEW it was copyrighted and the sole intention of the links was to aid people in breaking the law. 2.) They did this to earn $$$. This (as someone has pointed out) is basically Napster. Don't worry about Google. Google is a legitimate business whose sole existence is not the intentional linking of copyrighted material. (IANAL) -J