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

My take on this (as a geek and as an australian)

[jonwil]

IANAL btw.

I have no problems with the idea that knowingly linking to illegal material should also be illegal. For example, if I start telling people "go talk to bob, he can sell you some illegal drugs", that would be illegal because I am telling someone how to commit an illegal act. Same deal here, linking to a webpage containing illegal material is equivilant to telling someone how to obtain that illegal material. Human edited directories such as Yahoo should also fall under this. Search engines like google that do not monitor or filter their content should not be liable for linking to illegal content unless they are specificially notified and asked to remove the links (or whatever).

The part about ISPs being liable is totally wrong. Say I own a hotel. I rent a room to someone (who pays me for it). That person then uses the room to conduct an illegal act. Does that mean that I am liable for the illegal use of the room? Only if I am specifically notified (e.g. by the police) and fail to take appropriate action (e.g. ejecting the person from the hotel). The same should apply to ISPs and content providers. They should only be liable for illegal content if they have been specifically notified and fail to take action (be that removing the illegal content, shutting down the account, providing account details to the appropriate authorities or whatever).

Making ISPs legally liable for content stored on/hosted by (and potentially even passing through) their networks and forcing them to activly police content would send a number of ISPs out of business and cause a great many more to stop offering any kind of hosting service. (although just like the "stonecutters" in that simpsons episode, there is a big group of vested interests who want to see the internet as we know it today disappear or morph into something much more controled and difficult to publish on)