Submission + - Australian court: Don't link to copyrighted works
tjcrowder writes: "A federal court in Australia has upheld the earlier ruling that linking to copyrighted material (without permission) is "authorizing" copyright infringement (Sydney Morning Herald, full judgment). The mp3s4free.net website (now offline) provided direct links to mp3s of copyrighted works but didn't host the files. Various record companies brought suit against the owner of the website and the ISP (and one of their tech support guys). The court found that both the owner and ISP were liable for the copyright infringement they made possible (and profited from) because they knew the links could be used for infringement, had the power to take the site down, and didn't. From the judgement:
(You'll be glad to know that the hapless tech support guy was cleared [and the complainants ordered to pay his costs] on the basis that he had no power to take the site down.)"
From the Sydney Morning Herald article:Every time an internet user activated a link on the website, which was effective to download a sound recording in Australia that was stored on a remote computer, there was an infringing act. Mr Cooper created and operated the website. He could have prevented these infringing acts, either by not establishing the link in the first place or, subsequently, by disabling or removing the link. The fact that internet users could make other online copies of the sound recordings by other means does not detract from the fact that there were infringements as a consequence of effective activations of the links on the website operated by Mr Cooper.
And BoingBoing has a typically restrained view:Dale Clapperton, vice-chairman of the non-profit organisation 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."
"What Cooper was doing is basically the exact same thing that Google does, except Google acts as a search engine for every type of file, while this site only acts as a search engine for MP3 files," he said.
But they say intent is nine-tenths of the law. The judges clearly thought that the intent of the site was to promote and enable copyright infringement; they'd be unlikely to think the same of a general-purpose search engine. Steak knives can be used as murder weapons, but that's not the intent of their manufacture.If that precedent were adopted worldwide, there would be no Google, no Wikipedia, no internet as we know it.
(You'll be glad to know that the hapless tech support guy was cleared [and the complainants ordered to pay his costs] on the basis that he had no power to take the site down.)"
