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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)
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.
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
"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.
Only if the ISP took down the site as of the first notice sent by the RIAA. Their safe harbors are only available if they play by the industries rules. The industry would probably offer such an agreement with ISPs even if it wasn't in the law. They don't want to hurt business unless they think those businesses are encouraging the "piracy". They're more interested in getting individuals to make examples of, like the college students that did little more than make search engines that didn't specifically exclude music files. This guy was an example to the rest of us that if we link to sites committing infringement the industry can and will find a legal loophole to get at us.
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
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://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.