[privacy] Linking to copyrighted material could get you sued (in .au)

["Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>]

Judges may be leaning in this direction in order to build precedent
relevant to the govt's case against google...
--------------------


from: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36473


A LANDMARK ruling down under means that if people link to a page with
copyrighted material they could be sued for piracy.

 According to the Sydney Morning Herald, an Aussie Federal Court
upheld a ruling against Stephen Cooper, who ran a site called
pp3s4free.net for providing a search engine to enable the illegal
downloading of music MP3s.

 Also in the dock was his ISP, E-Talk, which had made no efforts to
take the site down after it was requested to do so. The court decided
that it was making money off the site by running advertisements.

 Sabiene Heindl, general manager of Music Industry Piracy
Investigations (MIPI) said the decision meant that anyone who stuck a
link on MySpace or on their bogs could now expect a knock on the door
from its briefs.

 Dale Clapperton, vice-chairman of the non-profit organisation
Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), warned that the ruling could
have wider implications for search engines such as Google. Cooper was
only doing the same thing as Google, except Google acts as a search
engine for every type of file, while this site only acts as a search
engine for MP3 files.

 Heindl disagreed saying that Mp3s4free was different in the sense
that it actually catalogued MP3 files that were infringing copyright
material - Google doesn't do that.

 Mind you, she added, action was being taken against Google in other
jurisdictions, and her outfit was rubbing its paws expectantly hoping
they would win that one.

 We thought we might link to the Sydney Morning Herald piece but since
it's the copyright of the Aussie publisher we didn't dare. You'll have
to find it on Google. µ

-JP<who wonders what cutting and pasting copyrighted material in an
email will get you...>:

-JP<who respectfully requests .au subscribers to get a .com email address ;-)
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