Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Courts Government Media Music Patents The Internet News

Australian Man Found Guilty for Hyperlinking 439

Posted by Zonk 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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Australian Man Found Guilty for Hyperlinking More

Australian Man Found Guilty for Hyperlinking

Comments Filter:

  • lovely (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:53AM (#13062024)
    Hi [allofmp3.com].

  • If he was running windows (Score:5, Funny)

    by farker haiku ( 883529 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:53AM (#13062025) Journal
    It should be hard to prove he did it... I mean, his machine could have been compromised

  • Allegedly? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:53AM (#13062026)
    If he was found guilty, then the charges are proven. They are no longer alleged.
    • Thank you! I was just about to post a similar thing!

      Last I checked, a verdict was a finding of facts on the case, ie 'The facts indicate that the accused did what they were accused of'.

      It's no longer a matter of it being alleged, it has been proven and the accused convicted. Next you (the poster of the article) are going to tell me that some convicted murderer or child molester allegedly killed or molested someone.

      • If courts always prove someone's guilt or innocence, how do you explain the numerous guilty verdicts that are overturned on appeal to a higher court.

        • Re:Allegedly? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Seraphim1982 ( 813899 )
          I doubt it works the same everywhere, but in the US courts never prove someones innocence.

        • Re:Allegedly? (Score:2, Informative)

          by s2k2vidguy ( 753453 )
          If courts always prove someone's guilt or innocence, how do you explain the numerous guilty verdicts that are overturned on appeal to a higher court.

          Appeals courts will not find the verdict itself at fault. The court will find that some irregularity at trial occured that caused a faulty verdict. I know that sounds a bit contradictory but the verdict itself isn't the problem, some other factor is. The court will then overturn the lower court's finding, or verdict on those grounds. The higher court isn't n

        • Re:Allegedly? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by DaHat ( 247651 )
          Lucky for us, at least in this country (US), the # of innocent people being convicted of crimes is remarkably low. And as some have pointed out, just because a verdict is overturned does not mean that someone did not commit the act that they were accused of.

          For an example of this, see the recent Washington (State) Supreme Court Ruling where they effectively created a legal meaning for innocent whereby a person who was convicted of a crime and later had that verdict thrown out must prove their innocence in

    • Re:Allegedly? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:22AM (#13062232)

      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.

    • Re:Allegedly? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jtpalinmajere ( 627101 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:42AM (#13062391)
      This is somewhat a misnomer. Many crimes can be set up in such a way to implicate an innocent person. When this innocent person is convicted because all (or most / the most influential) the evidence points to him, does this still mean that it is "proven" that he did it? In the same instance, what happens when a criminal gets caught red handed doing something, but because of a foulup in following procedures the criminal actually gets off. Does this mean that the criminal has been "proven" to not have committed the crime?

      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.

      • Re:Allegedly? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ifwm ( 687373 )
        "When this innocent person is convicted because all (or most / the most influential) the evidence points to him, does this still mean that it is "proven" that he did it?"

        Yes. No, it doesn't make much sense, but we're talking about LAW here, so let's not expect it to.

        "In the same instance, what happens when a criminal gets caught red handed doing something, but because of a foulup in following procedures the criminal actually gets off. Does this mean that the criminal has been "proven" to not have committ

  • In other news.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dr_labrat ( 15478 ) <spooner@noSpam.gmail.com> on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:54AM (#13062028) Homepage
    A man in Queensland was found guilty of pointing at a stolen car in the street....
  • Now in the US, the DMCA would have let the ISP off the hook scott free. Yay for safe harbors!

    • Re:See, the DMCA isn't so bad (Score:5, Informative)

      by bedroll ( 806612 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:06AM (#13062107) Journal
      Now in the US, the DMCA would have let the ISP off the hook scott free. Yay for safe harbors!

      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.

  • This is retarded... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:54AM (#13062036)
    to put it politely... just too stupid for words... how, exactly, did he "pirate" the works in question??? Looks like we need to slap some judges upside the head with a cluestick... Google et al, had better watch out... they'll now have to filter out possible copyrighted works in any links produced in searches... this is a very dangerours legal ruling.

    • Re:This is retarded... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DaHat ( 247651 )
      There is a slight difference between this case and Google.

      In this case, the person knowingly and willingly put a link up and made them a willing accessory to a crime.

      In the case of Google, they are unknowingly doing so, and if you point out their mistake, will quickly remove such offending links from their database to avoid getting sued.
      • Google has smart people. Those people are smart enough to know that Google indexes copyrighted material. I could see a lawyer for a major label arguing that Google knows that copyrighted content is indexed on a regular basis - intentional or not Google is helping people find whatever copyrighted material people want to find.

        I imagine this would actually be easier to argue in a court than the mentioned case, now that hyperlinking to "bad" sites is a no-no.
        • The other horrible thing about this is that "copyrighted material" doesn't include just songs and such, it includes every web page on the Internet (except stuff explicitly placed in the Public Domain), which means just about everything Google does is illegal!

          Well, according to this insane ruling, at least...

    • Re:This is retarded... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SlimFastForYou ( 578183 ) <konsoleman@yaAUDENhoo.com minus poet> on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:18AM (#13062201) Journal
      If I were running a search engine company and this started happening on a semi-regular basis, I'd probably say screw it and put up a special page for Australian IPs telling the people they need to do something about their laws. I'll bet if Australia scares off Google people are going to take notice and put some heat on their representatives. I mean come on, even a company the size of Google can't be expected to filter the entire Internet of any possible copyrighted content that is displayed on public web sites.
    • If you take a deep breath and think about it, it's really a slam-dunk case. If he knowingly set up his site with links to copyrighted material, then he obviously facilitated the copyright infringement. Depending on the specifics of Australian law, he may or may not be as culpible as the people downloading material.

      I mean come on, it's obvious what the site was intended for. The legal challenge would seem to be in proving that he knew the linked sites had infringing material, yet he posted the links anyw

    • I've never "pirated" music off the internet, myself, but I don't pass judgment on those who do, since I doubt that even the majority are freeloaders. However, cases like this almost make me want to start downloading music illegally and then deleting it just to irritate the record companies and make the "pirating" statistics go up. (I said "almost", for anybody who might be listening...)

    • If Australia's copyright laws are like the USA/Canada's, then everything ever written/published has implicit copyright... this would mean that Google should not link to anything ever written/published/etc. from there and not return any links to stuff from any country that has the same or similar clause.

      Yes, this and the new proposed canadian bill of a similar nature in an earlier story are retarded.

  • What about Search Engines? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You know, google hyperlinks to a whole lot of sites, someone in austrailia should start suing them over it too.

  • Next in line... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by laetus42 ( 899781 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:56AM (#13062046)
    Google, for linking to illegal music, texts, pictures and videos...

    • Re:Next in line... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 )
      Don't forget Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital for allowing their storage. And CTX, iiyama, Dell for making monitors to watch pirated movies on.

      I expect Tim Berners-Lee to be arrested any day now for enabling so much piracy. Along with pretty much every operator of a web proxy.
    • yeah, I thought it heard that perfect 10 was sueing google for linking to pictures.
    • For the love of god people, why not just sue the recording industry for piracy? Why? Because they are the ones who make the stuff that make us all want to pirate! "It's not my fault officer, the recording company made me do it! I had to have the CD so bad, I didn't have time to give them my money!"

      The difference here is intent. Very few companies intentionally provide a means for you to commit such crimes. Such means are intended for other, legitimate uses, and if a user crosses the line, the provider is g

  • Linking can be taken to several levels (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lockz ( 556773 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:57AM (#13062048)
    How far can this go? If you can be guilty for linking to a site, what about linking to a site that links to a site? And so on ... there needs to be a point where you can't be expected to have control.

    • And so on ... there needs to be a point where you can't be expected to have control.

      IIRC, this is the distinction that Dutch judges have made: knowlingly linking to pirated stuff (or a site hosting or linking such stuff) constitutes an offense. Linking to Billy's Blog in a webring or on your "interesting blogs" page is not an offense, should Billy or his friends happen to post a few links to pirated MP3s. But linking to a warez site under the header "Get ur mp3s here", is.

  • His crime (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TildeMan ( 472701 ) <.gsivek. .at. .mit.edu.> on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:57AM (#13062050) Homepage
    Yeah, maybe we all don't think he pirated, but couldn't this still be aiding / abetting? He was encouraging other people to pirate music, and giving them the means to do so.

    • Look at his site using the wayback machine (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kotku ( 249450 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @09:45AM (#13062975) Journal
      http://web.archive.org/web/20031010135440/http://w ww.mp3s4free.net/ [archive.org]

      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.

  • Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Corun ( 899780 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @07:57AM (#13062051)
    This seems a bit broken... I mean, If I tell someone that someone *over there* is a drug dealer, do I get arrested? How can he be held responsible for the content of other sites?

  • Not surprised really.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by victorhooi ( 830021 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:01AM (#13062077)
    As an Australian, I'd have to say this isn't entirely unexpected...

    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

    • 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...

      Sometimes I really feel like our "rights" and "freedoms" are being sold to the corporations...
    • "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?"

      Goto his website and have a look for yourself

      http://web.archive.org/web/20031010135440/http:// w ww.mp3s4free.net/ [archive.org]

      And this was what he was offering as *Popular Downloads* on his front page.

      White Flag
      by Dido
      P.I.M.P
      by 50 Cent
      Me Against The Music (CDS)
      by Britney Spears Ft Madonna
      Baby Boy
      by Beyonce ft. Sean Paul
      Someday
      by Nickelback
      Stand Up (Radio Edit)
      by Luda

  • Thought police .... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:02AM (#13062080) Homepage
    I know someone who copied a music CD ... should I go into hiding or turn him in & claim a bounty ?

  • Alleged? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Niello ( 572850 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:05AM (#13062096)
    From TFA:

    "Stephen Cooper, operator of the mp3s4free Web site, was found guilty of copyright infringement by Federal Court Justice Brian Tamberlin."

    It seems to have been proven...

    And what else do you expect to happen when you host a site named "mp3s4free"?

    • Re:Alleged? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by p0ppe ( 246551 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:09AM (#13062136) Homepage
      Yeah, mp3s are all illegal. And what else do you expect to happen when you host a site named "mp3s4free"?
    • And what else do you expect to happen when you host a site named "mp3s4free"?

      Oh, I don't know, maybe a link to a lot of indy sites where you can download really good music without all the claptrap of the **AAs hanging on? How about some links to sites that provide a one-stop shop for MP3s that both independent AND **AA artist have put out there for free? You know, like an aggregator of knowledge so that I'm not searching the entire frigging web for those free MP3s so that I can sample what a band has to o

  • The intent is relevant. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:14AM (#13062171)
    Frankly, the guy deserved it. mp3s4free.com was created solely to link to unauthorised copyrighted material, and for the purpose of boosting traffic on the ISP. That (summarised by me) was the courts finding.

    The article doesn't make clear whether it boiled down to intent. I hope that the finding was because he intended to link to the material - such a finding would protect those who inadvertantly had dodgy links (such as chat room hosts, etc...). If the finding sets a precedent that anyone hosting hyperlinks to infringing material, without intent, is a criminal, then that is a bad thing.

    Some have said that this is akin to being arrested for pointing to a drug dealer. Rubbish. It's more like running a bulletin board, the sole purpose of which is for dealers to list their contact details, and available drugs.
    • Is there a law against running a bulletin board for dealers and their available drugs? I'm sorry, but in order to be guilty, there has to be a law to be broken. When last I checked, there were no laws against listing information in any country. Of course, now it seems that Australia may be the first, and we've all just gone a little further down the Orwellian slippery slope.

      Intent is only used to measure the degree of a crime, not the crime itself. In order for linking to have been illegal itself, the

      • Re:The intent is relevant. (Score:3, Informative)

        by jbrw ( 520 )
        Australia's been banning books for years. Some friends got some nastygrams from Customs or similar when they tried to get some drug related book shipped in to the country. The timing fits in with this:

        http://www.ecstasy.org/books/australia.html [ecstasy.org]

        I think the book in question in the case of my friends was TiHKAL, as noted here:

        http://www.answers.com/topic/censorship-in-austral ia [answers.com]

        It was pretty random as to whether your copy would slip through customs.
      • Is there a law against running a bulletin board for dealers and their available drugs?

        IANAL, but a case might be made for aiding and abetting [findlaw.com]. Presumably, the Aussie judge felt something similar applied to this case.

        Of course, the question in my mind is why the litigants didn't let this guy keep going for a while, and use his site as a list of targets to sue; get him as an acessory AFTER you have all of the other cases. I guess filing costs would be too high, probably.

        Even with this, it's not clear

  • Teach a man to fish (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) <fidelcatsro@gmaDALIil.com minus painter> on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:15AM (#13062179) Journal
    www.google.com
    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
    • Good point, Mr. Catsup. Google is far and away the predominant tool used to seek out such copyrighted material, and even to seek out tools to download copyrighted material, or to seek out "how-to" articles.

      Could be worse: this guy could have linked to Google :)

    • Tut tut! This was a ruling in Austrailia, so I think that www.google.com.au would be more appropriate.
  • Chances are, they ruled based upon the outcome of the Grokster case (and what they're trying to get Bram Cohen with):

    Intent

    Cases for p2p were won originally because they only had the ability to allow users to infringe upon copyrights, but the programs were not themselves, infringing. What got Grokster is that the intent behind the entire program was to trade infringing material. And that's how they have ruled this link site.

    What's stupid is that even the ISP is being punished for it. Like everyone else h
    • Chances are, they ruled based upon the outcome of the Grokster case

      Legal precedent in an American court has nothing to do with that of Aussie courts.

      • Not directly, but several countries seem to base a lot of their new Intellectual Property laws and court rulings using the American cases (where we've pursued it the most) as a precedent.

        Whether for or against what America decides as 'right' in the IP wars, we've been (most likely) the biggest fighter in the world for these kinds of cases. We have set a reference point in a way for the War of Copyright.

  • WTF! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by djdole ( 588163 )
    Why didn't the guy just say that when he posted the link in the first place, there wasn't any pirated material on the site?
    I'm pretty sure they would have a hard time proving that the site was illegal at the TIME of posting.
    I mean even if the linked text was suspicious, he could have argued that the text of the link was changed AFTER the linking occurred.

    Anyone know the statute of limitation on illegal hyperlinking?

    God needs to implement HTML tags in life so we can pull a </DUMB PEOPLE> and rid the
  • From a user's perspective, a site with links to pirated files is the same as a site with pirated files. If I say click here to download Star Wars RotS, it doesn't matter where the file is located...I've enabled piracy. Obviously that was this guys intention.

    What if I create a web site called www.stolencreditcardnumbers.com, and using DHTML or PHP, list credit card numbers from some other source (a cracked bank site say, or someone who has a bunch of stolen numbers), shouldn't I face some kind of penalty fo

    • Your terms are wrong... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Svartalf ( 2997 )
      You had it right, and had me agreeing with you right on up to the point you called it "stealing". Copyright Infringement is just that- infringement. It's not theft as defined in legal circles as you're not depriving the parties involved of anything execpt potential profits. If I infringe on somebody's Copyrights, the Work in question is still there and they're not deprived of it's use. The value of the Copyright may be diminished, but overall, they can still sell copies until they're blue in the fac

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:59AM (#13062530)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Consult a lawyer before each breath (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Phat_Tony ( 661117 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:25AM (#13062258)
    Never mention to anyone that they sell fake watches on Canal street in New York.

    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.

  • I thought the US had the corner on the market for the most retarded copyright laws, but the Australians have surged into the lead with this ruling.

    Wow, it's so nice not to be the assbag country of the world for a change, even if it's just one small area. We can point to at least one country with more over-reaching and gestapoesque copyright rules than we have. Thanks you guys!

  • Is the problem linking or intention? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chris_Jefferson ( 581445 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:28AM (#13062278) Homepage
    Having read about this case, the person in question was linking to the site with the intention of showing people where to get pirated materials from.

    I'm not saying it should be illegal, but this is clearly different from either a) automated searching (like google) or b) linking to a site which happens to also contain pirated material.

    Should it be illegal to tell people "Hey, you want some pirated stuff? He has it, that guy over there!". I'm not sure, but that is what this case rests on.
  • Are they supposed to inspect every single link on webpages on their server in case one points to illegal material? You know what the astronomical costs are? I would highly doubt it could be done via automachia, but would require someone to check each link - and once they are done checking, go back and do it again. It would also require the ISP to go into secured sites that might be "pay only" and have proprietary information. So how is the ISP involved other then hosting the site? (which they probably ha

  • What about other sites... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sierpinski ( 266120 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:38AM (#13062361)
    I've seen sites that have links to pages that show you how to draw and quarter a human body. Now IANAL but I'm pretty sure that cutting up a dead body is illegal. Should those sites get dinged as well?

    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*
    • I've seen sites that have links to pages that show you how to draw and quarter a human body. Now IANAL but I'm pretty sure that cutting up a dead body is illegal. Should those sites get dinged as well?

      Unless you draw and quarter a major company's CEO with information you found on such a site, the politicians and courts really won't care about it. This is about money, not any moral 'right'.

  • It is called: Contributory infringement (Score:5, Informative)

    by sela ( 32566 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @08:51AM (#13062466) Homepage

    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
  • You got to love how the submitter conviently left out the site in question, called 'mp3s4free'.

    While normally I would jump on the bandwagon and shout how it would be very wrong to find someone convicted guilty for linking to copyrighted files(hell, even Google would be guilty of that), I find it more than logical a site which is so obviously hosting links to (copyrighted) works, to get convicted.

    Imo, the Grokster case in the US, set a nice, and imo fair, precedent.

  • I suggest he pay by telling them the street address of a bank that contains money.

    -
  • Next thing you know, a journalist is going to do a report on music file sharing/copyright issues/DRM, innocently including a factual statement such as, "Sites such as 'mp3s4free' make copies of songs from CDs available over the web," and she'll get sued for it.

    And based on this precedent, it wouldn't be far-fetched for her to lose.

  • Everyone has to constantly monitor links now? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rly2000 ( 779141 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @09:56AM (#13063081) Homepage

    What if someone links to a site, and later on that site puts up something illegal? Does this mean that I have to monitor my links daily to see whether they're suddenly doing something illegal?

    Alternatively, can I get my "referers" in trouble now by posting up mp3s? Ridiculous.

  • Have we already forgotten (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wk633 ( 442820 ) on Thursday July 14, 2005 @03:06PM (#13066471)
    The 2600 case?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/04/2600_withd raws_supreme_court_appeal/ [theregister.co.uk]

    If you're a hacker magazine, you can't even describe how people can find DeCSS via search engines.

    But if you're a professor trying to make a point, you can host DeCSS itself. ahref=http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ [slashdot.org]h ttp://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ >

Slashdot Top Deals

"Being against torture ought to be sort of a multipartisan thing." -- Karl Lehenbauer, as amended by Jeff Daiell, a Libertarian

Close