Slashdot Mirror
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.
``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.
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.
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.
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.
"..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.