Australia Rules Linking to Copyright Material Also Illegal

An anonymous reader writes "A recent ruling in Federal court upheld the ruling that the operator and ISP that hosted the site 'mp3s4free.net' were guilty of copyright infringement violations because they provided access to the copyright material. From the article: 'Dale Clapperton, vice-chairman of the non-profit organization Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), explained the ruling as follows: "If you give someone permission to do something that infringes copyright, that in itself is infringement as if you'd done it yourself. Even if you don't do the infringing act yourself, if you more or less condone someone else doing it, that's an infringing act."'"

Comments

Shutdown the Web!

[Flendon]

Well both the text of the article and the legal document make one thing very clear: By linking to any copyrighted material in Australia you are encouraging someone to download and use that material illegally.

Since almost everything published is protected under copyright almost all hyperlinks are illegal! The web as a whole is nothing but one great big collection of pirates and must be shutdown to protect the record industry!

Linking to Almost Anything Illegal

[RAMMS EIN]

``Australia Rules Linking to Copyright Material Also Illegal''

So, basically, linking to almost anything on the Internet is now illegal in Australia. After all, the vast majority of what is on the Internet is copyright material.

And what if you're not the one doing the linking? For example, your site is a forum and other people post the links there? Apparently, you're guilty, too. Even if you're the ISP hosting the site and had nothing at all to do with its content, you're guilty.

The workaround

[MTO_B.]

I'm just guessing, no expert at this, but...
Maybe a workaround would be to not provide the link itself, but only the url.
That is... no using of the a href tag.

Then, it could be considered as citing, just as books cite authors... you see the name, book, editorial, etc... and you have to manually search for it to buy it. In this case, you'd have to copy the url and enter it in the address bar.

Re:The workaround

[Spikeles]

I think you have the right idea there.. From the ruling:

42 I conclude that, within the meaning of s 101(1A)(a), Mr Cooper had power to prevent the copying in Australia of copyright sound recordings via his website. He had that power because he was responsible for creating and maintaining his MP3s4FREE website. As stated above, the principal content of the website comprised links to other websites and files contained on other servers. Senior counsel for Mr Cooper conceded that, in effect, the overwhelming majority of the files listed on the website were the subject of copyright. The website was structured so that when a user clicked on a link to a specific music file a copy of that file was transmitted directly to the user's computer.

Basically he got in trouble because he made it EASY to download the files. He wasn't linking to the page that contained the link to the file, he was directly linking to the MP3 itself.

Not all doom and gloom

[h2g2bob]

While it's easy to get sad, this kind of behavior is leading to a counterculture. Lots of stuff is being released using Creative Commons, GFDL (Wikipedia, etc), or even public domain. And the great thing is that a lot of it is much better than the next Pop Idol/American Idol song.

I have to wonder whether this sort of publishing would be anywhere near as successful, if the content industry weren't such bastards. I guess there is a market for good old customer service.

Also illegal in the US - according to FOX

[tttonyyy]

A few weeks ago Fox threatened Quicksilverscreen (and Quicksilverscreen's ISP) with a takedown notice. Not because Quicksilverscreen served any infringing material, but because it linked to it on YouTube (amongst others).

http://quicksilverscreen.com/is-linking-illegal/

So is Australia setting the precident for the US? I hope not.

Re:Bizarre.

[jc42]

Next stop - close down the local library - everyone there is either infringing copyright or contributing to it ...

This isn't a joke or something hypothetical. If you pay attention to discussions in the publishing industry, one of the statistics you'll see bandied about is that each book sold is read on the average by four people. This is invariably used to show that there's a huge missed "marketing" opportunity. 3/4 of readers are getting their books without paying for them.

Now, if you look at the books you have at home, you'll probably have trouble finding even one that was read by more than two people, right? So where does this average of four come from? Right - libraries. Publishers have long considered public libraries a major cause of lost income. If they could shut them down, they would, and they're starting to see how this might be done.

Publishers have been heartened by recent "advances" in copyright law and the advent of electronic publishing. They see these as tools to end the practice of lending books to others, by moving to a system where every reader must pay for what they read. It has worked for the software industry, except for the ongoing problem of piracy. The music recording industry is slowly succeeding at making illegal the sort of sharing that used to be common when music only came on physical recording media like records and tapes. There's a good chance that sharing of what used to be printed material can also be stopped in the forseeable future.

So don't take libraries as some sort of God-given exception that will always be with us. Libraries were created by reformers who wanted to make information available to everyone despite the desires of publishers, and the publishing industry is looking forward to the day that libraries can be eliminated.