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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."
Hi.
It should be hard to prove he did it... I mean, his machine could have been compromised
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
If he was found guilty, then the charges are proven. They are no longer alleged.
A man in Queensland was found guilty of pointing at a stolen car in the street....
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Now in the US, the DMCA would have let the ISP off the hook scott free. Yay for safe harbors!
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...
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.
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?
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
I know someone who copied a music CD ... should I go into hiding or turn him in & claim a bounty ?
"Stephen Cooper, operator of the mp3s4free Web site, was found guilty of copyright infringement by Federal Court Justice Brian Tamberlin."
It seems to have been proven...
And what else do you expect to happen when you host a site named "mp3s4free"?
I give men fish.
I think Neptune is still relatively safe.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
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.
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
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.
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.
So no, Google isn't going to be sued. Why attempt to sue when they can afford decent legal defence?
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?
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'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!
The US courts had long ago ruled that contributory infringement applies to copyrights. It is no surprise, therefore, that Oz courts accepted the same legal theory.
Contributory infringement for copyright is a court-created theory. It was never passed as a law. The law does refer to contributory infringement of patents, and court decided it should be applied to copyright violation as well.
You may be guilty of contributory infringement if two tests hold:
1. Specifity: the information you provide must be specific, and detailed enough to enable the reciever of the information to make and infinging copy of a copyrighted work.
2. Intent: you provide the information with an intent to promote copyright violation.
Disclaimer: IANAL
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://thepiratebay.org/ is legal in Sweden.
But is it legal to link to it from Australia? Or from Denmark for that matter! Maybe I should hide. Or blame Slashdot for autolinking URLs.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
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
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.
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
Sue Google, then!
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.
So, the judge infringes and Mr Cooper is found guilty.
Bert
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/