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Australian Man Found Guilty for Hyperlinking
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jul 14, 2005 07:51 AM
from the dark-day-for-the-rebellion dept.
from the dark-day-for-the-rebellion dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Major record labels are celebrating in Sydney, Australia today. It took almost two years but they've finally won a legal battle against a Queensland man and his ISP for alleged music piracy. Amazingly, Stephen Cooper didn't even have to host the alleged pirated files. All he did (allegedly) was to hyperlink to a few sites that had infringing sound recordings. His ISP didn't escape either. Even the ISP's parent company got sued. No jail time but all parties will have to pay costs."
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If he was running windows (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If he was running windows (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Allegedly? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Allegedly? (Score:5, Insightful)
If he was found guilty, then the charges are proven. They are no longer alleged.
Err... the charges are proven from the court's perspective. The submitter apparently doesn't agree with the court, and so for him/her the charges are still alleged.
Parent
Re:Allegedly? (Score:5, Insightful)
In all cases, any judgement is based upon the 'evidence' at hand... in some cases not all 'evidence' is actually admitted for one reason or another as well as the occasion where irrelevant / false 'evidence' is actually admitted into the case. At best, a verdict can be considered a very educated hypothesis.
Proven implies that the judgement is made upon facts that are incontrovertible... like the fact that 1 + 1 = 2, arithmetically speaking. Since the vast majority of 'evidence' submitted to the court rarely fits this criteria, there almost always exists room (even inside the room of "without reasonable doubt") for the verdict to be flawed.
Therefore, it would still be correct to consider the crimes alleged even when a person if "found guilty" of committing them.
Parent
Re:Allegedly? (Score:5, Insightful)
That seems a fairly ridiculous statement to make, as it's impossible to determine it one way or the other. Even measuring the number of people subsequently found not-guilty (or acquitted) is hardly likely to be accurate.
Manta
Parent
In other news.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In other news.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:In other news.... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:In other news.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What it is NOT like is the Ticketmaster decision [wired.com] in the US which ruled that a link is not copyright infringement. I don't think this ruling could stand in the US.
Parent
This is retarded... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is retarded... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Next in line... (Score:4, Insightful)
Linking can be taken to several levels (Score:5, Interesting)
His crime (Score:5, Interesting)
Look at his site using the wayback machine (Score:5, Insightful)
It is pretty obvious he was acting as a filesharing hub pretty much as Napster did. This was not coincidental linking it was linking to copyright infringed material for the express pursuit of aquiring advertising revenue. He knew exactly what he was doing. No sympathy here.
Again the slashdot moral majority starts having a blabbering fit over thier rights being infringed and all that but this is a pretty simple case. He was actively using his website to encourage a very specifical criminal activity not a few coincidental links in a sea of other detail.
Parent
Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad really.
Tom
Parent
Not surprised really.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the judges here have been a little slow on the uptake...the Sony mod-chipping debacle is but one example, as is the whole lack of "fair use" right for electronic works...
Was the man found guilty of linking to a list of pirated mp3s? Or did he link to a site which contained, among a lot of other things, pirated mp3s? In the case of the latter, I don't see how you can argue that he was intending for them to pirate material...
Seriously, has anybody thought about the ramification of this for free speech? The recent debacle with record companies whining about the BBC releasing those free tracks has some echoes of this...
cya, Victor
Teach a man to fish (Score:5, Interesting)
Search for "Filetype:torrent example album"
Now what i have just done is give people the skill to find their own files and commit copyright infringement or of course search for legal downloads.
What i have just done is far far worse than a guy linking to a few warez sites.
Show a man a download link and he will download one file , Teach him to use google and he can warez himself for life
Consult a lawyer before each breath (Score:5, Interesting)
Never tell anyone that there are drug dealers in the park down the street, even for their own safety.
You had also better never report a crime to authorities. That is also providing information on how to locate illegal activity.
Someone should print out the web address of a stolen copyrighted work that's freely available online, go into a court house in Australia, and stick it to a bulletin board. Then they should sue the government for hosting that information, citing this case as precedent.
What about other sites... (Score:5, Interesting)
What about links to legitimate news sites that happen to run a story on "how easy it is to steal an oldsmobile with a screwdriver" only to see the theft rate of oldsmobiles increaseed sharply in the next 5 days after the article? That happened to my parents some time ago. Now I'd bet a small amount of money that the person who stole their car saw how to do it (in some great detail I might add) on the news. Shouldn't the news station be responsible for that?
The fact that this happened in Australia comforts me slightly, but only slightly. I'm waiting for some RIAA executive to put a bug in a congressman's ear about the same type of thing here. The part that really scares me is things like that can become law easily by tailing it onto the back of some sure-to-pass appropriations bill or other popular piece of legislature....
Which leads me to a slightly offtopic but (IMO) a completely legitimate idea:
Congress should pass a law prohibiting bills from coattail-riding on other unrelated bills. If its important enough to pass a law about, its important enough to deserve its own vote.
Ok, rant over. *whew*
It is called: Contributory infringement (Score:5, Informative)
The US courts had long ago ruled that contributory infringement applies to copyrights. It is no surprise, therefore, that Oz courts accepted the same legal theory.
Contributory infringement for copyright is a court-created theory. It was never passed as a law. The law does refer to contributory infringement of patents, and court decided it should be applied to copyright violation as well.
You may be guilty of contributory infringement if two tests hold:
1. Specifity: the information you provide must be specific, and detailed enough to enable the reciever of the information to make and infinging copy of a copyrighted work.
2. Intent: you provide the information with an intent to promote copyright violation.
Disclaimer: IANAL
Re:See, the DMCA isn't so bad (Score:5, Informative)
Only if the ISP took down the site as of the first notice sent by the RIAA. Their safe harbors are only available if they play by the industries rules. The industry would probably offer such an agreement with ISPs even if it wasn't in the law. They don't want to hurt business unless they think those businesses are encouraging the "piracy". They're more interested in getting individuals to make examples of, like the college students that did little more than make search engines that didn't specifically exclude music files. This guy was an example to the rest of us that if we link to sites committing infringement the industry can and will find a legal loophole to get at us.
Parent
Re:Alleged? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent