Australia court: link to copyrighted material, feel the wrath

Bloggers, MySpacers, and anyone else who links to copyrighted material without permission is fair game for legal action, a court in Australia has ruled. Not "hosts," not "uploads," not "downloads," but "links to." If that precedent were adopted worldwide, there would be no Google, no Wikipedia, no internet as we know it. Universal Music, Warner Music, Festival Records, EMI and BMG were among the companies who sued:

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. [She] 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".

Link to story in Sydney Morning Herald, link to decision.

[via Boing Boing]