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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."'"
Sorry Australians, no more internet for you. As soon as legal departments look at this, expect all your big ISPs, Yahoo, Google, MySpace, etc to all flee Australian shores.
[1] Although frankly, with a site called mp3s4free.net what the hell did he expect?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Isn't this like preventing a news reporter from referring to a book, because someone might go out and photocopy it illegally? If this layman's analogy was given, how many common people would think this ruling to be idiocy?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
How is linking on a web page any different than the references and citations that have been in printed material, and probably hand written before that, almost forever? The only difference is that it automates the procedure of 'going to the appropriate stack, finding the referenced book or article, and opening it at the appropriate page'.
I am going to kill my neighbor. Every one here is guilty of not stopping me. Well, at least all Australians.
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!
chown -R us
Quick, jettison all common sense and everybody do the freakout!!
Thank you Australia for showing us there is a nation in the "free world" with it's head *just a little" further up it's ass than America when it comes to copyright law. Remember, every inch counts.
This kind of thing means no more internet for more than just Australians.
There is a concerted effort to turn the internet into cable television. The entertainment/military/industrial complex is working with the big telcos to make sure Slashdot becomes a quaint throwback to the days of open internet. Sure there will still be geeks pining about the days when any old body could put up a web site that could get the same attention as one put up by Sony, and a couple of nobodies could come up with a Google, but face it, that's just not the way of the world.
Don't get fooled by the $12.95 per month DSL. Forces are working overtime to put ISPs as we know them out of business. When they finally put the last nail in the coffin of Net Neutrality, watch how fast things change. Then, get ready for all of the internet to look like myspace, and watch for the articles about how great it is that we're free to choose our own "friends". We're already seeing more and more of magazines like Wired dedicated to the joys of the mercantilisation of what's left of the Web.
Remember, Google became a phenomenon without adverts, and existed for years that way. Could that happen today? Think it will happen when there's no "neutrality" about the Web? Freedom never gets easier to defend.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, how about this Google search query?
e t+mp3
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Azshare.n
Google provides easy access to a lot of copyrighted material...
:wq!
``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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
What if someone posts links on a forum (or other site that allows user comments). Would the site owners be responsbile? This could be a great (awful) way to blackmail people.
Philosophy.
According to TFA, he's guilty because he had the power to stop the exchange of copyrighted materials. He must be one powerful guy, to be able to do what governments around the world are trying to do and failing.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
One word is missing from all the comments it's "intent". For one to be breaking the law for linking you have to show clear "intent" to infringe copyright or assist in infringing copyright. The ISP in this case "clearly knew" that this service was "intentionally" infringing copyright. I hate DRM and all the copycrap just as much as anyone else but these guys were first class idiots and Im far from surprised from the decision. I doubt Google will face the same issue because there is little if any intent to infringe copyright they merely want to catalog the web.
We are seeing too many of those laws and court rulings that treat "cyber" crimes as something different from "real world" crimes. They are not. There is such a thing as being an "accessory" to crime, and every crime should be treated equally in this respect.
If someone creates a facility specifically designed for an illegal action, then that's a violation. If someone uses a facility created legally for an illegal purpose, without the knowledge of the owner, then the owner shouldn't be an accessory, unless he was grossly negligent. Having a chop shop is illegal, however if you rent a garage and use it to take apart stolen cars without the knowledge of the garage owner, then the owner shouldn't be considered an accessory to the crime.
The real cause of this is that this "intellectual property" thing has been so distorted from its original purpose. The reason for copyrights and patents is to give an incentive for the creation of new intellectual works. It's not the intention to create mega-corporations that manage a few "super stars" for marketing while exploring the works of thousands of artists who are forced to sell their works for very little. It's not the intention to eternally perpetuate the ownership of works from artists who are long dead. It's not the intention to create a monopolistic network of distribution for films and music where the artist must comply with the monopoly's rules if he wants to survive.
Faced by such a monster as the existing system for marketing music and films, the people are reacting. They are realizing that not all is as it should be. I for one do not agree to pay a tax to a singer such as Mariah Carey, who got $50 million from the recording company as severance pay because people wouldn't buy her "music". I do not agree to pay the expenses of other millionaire rock stars every time I buy a record from my favorite artist. The price of music and films is steadily up because there is no real competition, everything is handled by a handful of corporations who feel like they must decide what we want to watch and listen.
Now they want to move the burden of maintaining their inviable system to us, the people. That's why they are buying so many legislators to create draconian laws. In the end the current system has no chance to survive. They must realize that they cannot keep an unfair and unjust system just by declaring "illegal" any attempt to fight it.
Gimme a break. The guy's site was mp3sForFree.net or some such. If this site is linking to copyrighted material (and you accept that such material is an infringement [which btw I do not]) and that is all that it does then the ruling is not as draconian as all the jerking knees here might suggest. The purpose of a common law barrister is to distingush MyHomePage.com and Google.com from the subject of this case and the power of the common law is for judges to accept that distinction and therefore make the context free "black letter law" a bit more sane. As we say in Australia "pull your head in".
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
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.
And what if I link to someone who links to something illegal? (:
Maxim
This is a problematic law with very little thought applied to the nature of the medium in which it operates.
What is not covered there is the very distinct possibility that you link to a site that does not include any infringing material, and over time, some leaks onto the linked pages.
By the act of someone else modifying content outside your control, you become guilty of Copyright Infringement.
It would be interesting to see what extent that leads on to. For example, a governmental site links to an external address. The domain owner of this site changes, take the destination of the link and serves a redirect (or hosts) a warez repository at that link.
Unless this link is monitored exceptionally well (and none of those governmental sites ever have a stale link do they!), the government would then be guilty of Copyright Infringement, and thus performing illegal activity.
Bet I'm not the only one that sees this coming.
Having a law that states linking to something is committing copyright infringement is unworkable. If the intent (which needs to be proved) was to provide access to infringing material hosted elsewhere, then this should fall under 'accessory to' legislation. But intent needs be proved that the intent was to infringe copyright, not provide access to legitimate resources that may become contaminated by an external source (in which case, the external source should be identified and dealt with by the correct bodies).
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.
Soon the inventors of the Internet will be sued. What will happen to Al Gore?
That may be well and good for static HTML sites (but who makes those anymore?), where the website 'administrator' manually types in the links, but what about dynamic content?
So let's pretend that they allow search engines to provide those links. Who would then be 'guilty'? Anyone who accidentally uses the search engine to generate those search results? Or any site that uses the google or yahoo search apis to do searching on their site? Again, is it the person typing in a search, the site that embeds the search engine api, or the search engine company?
Or maybe this law wasn't really thought through well enough. Maybe it really is only the person posting the copyrighted work.
It's a question of intent. The judges wrote:
The same cannot be said of Google.(IANAL)
You are a blogger or other web content publisher. You write an article which cites non-copyrighted content by way of a href URL, say http://www.somedomain.com/link.html, for example. Later the owner of of that web page changes it to contain copyrighted material. You do not notice, and do not remove the citation in your content.
Are you still violating copyright ??
Yet another idiot who simply does not understand the subject matter he is making pronouncement upon.
I'll take that bet. My money's on the world.
Historically, it has been common for industries, laws, and other Big Systems to favour the corporations in new endeavours. Twice armed is he who knows his cause is just, but thrice armed is he who gets his blow in first, and all that. Let's face it, corporations with their huge financial and lobbying power tend to be pretty quick off the mark at stealing an advantage over the public. Perhaps more to the point, until they try it, the public don't know what they have to protect themselves against.
But a little further down the line, perhaps 5-10 years for the things I can think of off the top of my head, the public always win. The next big swing I'm expecting is for DRM, when the public start to realise that they've been had. DRM is relatively safe as long as it doesn't annoy the average person and only geeks see what's wrong with it, but it's been getting serious for a few years now. As people's first MP3 players start dying or they upgrade their PCs and they realise they can't take their music collection with them, as people who spent a fortune on early HDTVs get told they can't watch HD discs they paid a premium for at any better resolution than a normal DVD because of something called HDCP, as people whose legitimately purchased software starts deactivating itself in a case of mistaken identity and costing them or their business time and money... Then the people will cease to accept it, DRM will become a political timebomb, and the politicians and lawyers will turn on the tech and media companies who advocate DRM like piranha in a frenzy. It always ends this way, when something good is corrupted by corporate interests; it's only a matter of time.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So, with this logic used in this ruling... ...does that mean copy machine manufacturers are liable for people using their products to copy books, magazines, photos, money? does that mean computer manufacturers are liable for people using [i] their [/i] products to infringe on copywright? where is the line drawn? blank CD companies? CD recorders?
This ruling seems to encompass just about anyone on earth since most products can and may be used for facilitating copyrigbht infringements.
How can you give someone "permission" to infringe a copyright, patent, or other IP that you don't own? I could see that being considered fraud, like selling the Golden Gate Bridge or the CN Tower, but contributory?
If you have a group of people discussing ways to infringe restrictions or bypass IP laws, you might have opportunities for collusion or some variant on racketeering. But as a society, how can you afford to make it illegal to discuss such important issues and avenues for bringing about social change when the *AA and such get out of hand? There would have to be significant allowance for the freedom of speech in many jurisdictions; certainly I wouldn't expect the legislation around the world to be too consistent given the variety of viewpoints on the issues of IP.
Take the US patent database, for instance. Several attempts to push that database of junk patents on the EU have been rebuffed.
Those who try to create business patents forget a few key points:
The US patent database is stuffed to the brim with such junk. My favourite example is trying to claim a patent over linking a user action to triggering a sale. Whether it is a single mouse click in a GUI, web browser, menu item, popup list selection, or other user interaction is irrelevant. The basic user interaction techniques and algorithms have been discussed, designed, prototyped, and implemented since Alan Kay was at Xerox PARC.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you think that is nasty, Try this
Sharon is going to get really pissed off I guess...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
"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."
If you CONDONE someone else doing it, you're an accomplice. You don't even have to explicitly condone it, just "more or less".
No, no dangerous precedent there at all.
-Styopa
>> Australia Rules Linking to Copyright Material Also Illegal
That really had me wondering at first. I have over 30 CD's on my website. All the content on my website is Copyright. So did Australia make my own links, internal and extermal, which point to my own website illegal? What gives them the right? I am the copyright holder, so how can they make linking to copyright material in and of itself illegal?
Then I RTFA and found out that the title, much like AP our Reuters, has nothing to do with the actual story.
The idea of copyright is already becoming obsolete, most of your ideas are not original but are mostly based on some thing yo have already observed. you can not say just because you got there first you own this idea, do you really think you came up with that idea all on your own, with out the rest of humanity? the only reason for copy right to still exist is to place materialistic value on ideas and thought. by making linking illegal then yeah as said b4 you just basically said you cannot access any existing information in the system because we don't like to share; which is just plain stupid. the corporations are failing to realise the old system of controlled distribution and monopolization cant no long be enforced when it comes to information based content.
I agree, Anonymous Brave Guy.
My money is also on the desire for free expression, free exchange of ideas and information.
But it's important to remember that the forces of greed have massive resources and, increasingly, the power of government. And because of the technology (see:Money) required to keep the internet running, it's fragile. We'll soon start hearing that a free internet is a haven for terrorists, so it has to be locked down.
If it comes, the end of the Internet as we know it will take the form of "Homeland Security".
As that old Greek dude said: "This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs: When he first appears, he is a protector." - Plato
You are welcome on my lawn.
"..but we are absolutely not a police state." - db32
Buddy, I count 23 video cameras on my 25km bike ride from home to work. That's not counting the still cameras on major intersections looking for speeders and people running the stop lights.
You and I can be held indefinitely without charges. There was just a story about a guy who was picked up, bundled up and shipped off ("renditioned") to Egypt where he was tortured for a couple of years. The only reason we heard about it was because he was THE WRONG GUY.
The government no longer needs a warrant to tap our phones or a reason (habeas corpus) to arrest and hold us. The number of documents that the current Administration has declared "Classified" has gone up by over 5000 percent, and the GAO has estimated that only about 5 percent of those secret documents relate to National Security, allowing the government to operate in near total secrecy (and better, with the appearance of openness, thanks to a complicit media).
What do you think a police state looks like?
You are welcome on my lawn.
NOTHING illegal about making a site called mp3s4free.net.
In the United States, Grokster was decided in large part because of the overall effect of Grokster's marketing of its service. The "inducement to infringe" was proven by Grokster advertising, which compared it to Napster and in effect said, "Hey, Napster is illegal and got shut down, but you can do the same stuff at our wonderful site that you used to be able to do at Napster!" Many legal commentators have noted that if Grokster hadn't so obviously stepped on its crank, the US Supreme Court might have decided the case differently. Instead of begging to be sued, they should have touted the non-infringing uses of the service, such as sharing public domain content.
People jump all over courts for being "stupid" when they don't see the obvious. The mp3s4free name in itself obviously isn't illegal. But it seems that mp3s4free was engaged in rather obvious and stupid inducement to infringe, and the "we're just linking to other sites" argument is a poor smokescreen for the fact that it was a clearinghouse for infringing activity. Your repetition of the word NOTHING doesn't change that.
Filesharing services need to get smart about the law if they want to win these cases. They need to build the services carefully, bringing in partners (such as Archive.org for example) who can provide a wide range of files (think academic uses, archiving of public domain works, sharing of user-created materials). The more a P2P service can show that it is really about distribution of useful content, rather than mere inducement to infringe copyrighted works, the easier it will be to de-stigmatize P2P services in general. In the mean time, the courts and the public at large will look at P2P as a technology used primarily to infringe on copyrighted works.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Libraries are now illegal.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Almost everything on the web is copyrighted?
Even if something is freeware, it's still copyrighted.
Open source like Firefox is copyrighted too.
This just get a big WTF from me.
This random image (warning, illegal link!?) is copyrighted unless the photographer explicitly released his rights and placed it into the public domain, which is a quite rare thing to do. All created material is copyrighted the owner, even if the owner doesn't claim so, right?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
technicaly, all torrent sites that only run the .torrent files could also be illegal in australia, since they (in some way) link to copyrighted material.
portfolio
Some MP3 files have been released into the public domain by their auhors and are no longer copyrighted. And "copyrighted mp3s" is short for "mp3s copyrighted by someone important who has the time and inclination to protect their copyright." Finally, not all countries that are signatory to the Berne convention have the same exact rules. To be safe, use the phrase "Copyright [date] by [author]. All rights reserved." Even though not strictly necessary in most places, it will help you win and recover more damages in court.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton