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.