[ECP] From Australia: Copyright ruling puts hyperlinking on notice

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From Australia: Copyright ruling puts hyperlinking on notice
http://tinyurl.com/yx5sek
A court ruling has given the recording industry the green light to go
after individuals who link to material from their websites, blogs or
MySpace pages that is protected by copyright.
A full bench of the Federal Court yesterday upheld an earlier ruling
that Stephen Cooper, the operator of mp3s4free.net, as well as the
internet service provider that hosted the website, were guilty of
authorising copyright infringement because they provided a search
engine through which a user could illegally download MP3 files.
The website did not directly host any copyright-protected music, but
the court held that simply providing links to the material
effectively authorised copyright infringement.
"Mr Cooper had power to prevent the communication of copyright sound
recordings to the public in Australia via his website," the judges said.
"He had that power because he was responsible for creating and
maintaining his mp3s4free website."
Ms Sabiene Heindl, general manager of Music Industry Piracy
Investigations (MIPI), said similar action could be taken against
individuals who, like mp3s4free, used the internet to link to
copyright-protected material.
The case against Mr Cooper was brought by 36 parites including
leading recording companies like Universal Music, Warner Music,
Festival Records, EMI and BMG.
Ms Heindl said that this could apply even if a person had embedded a
copyright-infringing YouTube clip in their blog or MySpace page.
"We don't make any distinctions between big websites or small
websites", she said, adding that MIPI would consider individual blogs
on a "case-by-case basis as to whether it would be appropriate to
take action".
Ms Heindl's message to Australians is clear: "If you are linking to
copyrighted material in an unauthorised fashion, then you can be held
liable for copyright infringement."
In yesterday's Cooper judgment, the ISP that hosted the website,
E- Talk, was also found to be guilty of authorising copyright infringement.
The court found that E-Talk profited from the copyright infringement
of mp3s4free.net's users through advertisements on the website and
took no efforts to take the site down.
"E-Talk countenanced the infringing downloading by internet users who
visited the website that it hosted," the court held.
"The fact is that E-Talk could have prevented the infringements that
actually occurred."
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."
Mr Clapperton added that this ruling could have wider implications
for general search engines such as Google.
"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 Ms Heindl said MIPI would not be going after Google in the same
way it sued mp3s4free.net.
"Mp3s4free was different in the sense that it actually catalogued MP3
files that were infringing copyright material - Google doesn't do
that," she said.
"There is, however, action that is being taken against Google in
other jurisdictions, and we're awaiting that eagerly."
The full judgement can be found here.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/2006/187.html

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