Linking to copyright music posted elsewhere online without permission can be illegal, an Australian appeals court ruled Monday.
The issue before a three-judge panel at the Federal Court of Australia was whether Stephen Cooper, a retired policeman who ran the now-defunct site MP3s4free.net, was legally allowed to post links to mostly copyright MP3 files hosted on other servers. Cooper does not appear to have hosted any copyright music on MP3s4free.net.
Upholding a single judge’s ruling from last summer, the appeals panel agreed that linking runs afoul of Australia’s copyright laws, handing a victory to Universal Music Australia and the other major labels that brought the suit in 2004.
“A principal purpose of the Web site was to enable infringing copies of the downloaded sound recordings to be made,” Judge Susan Kenny wrote in her opinion. “The fact that the Web site also carried a warning that some downloading could be illegal did not lessen the force of the invitation.”
Cooper, a resident of the state of Queensland, had argued that he had no power to prevent illegal copying because users could “automatically” add links to the site without his control. He likened his site to Google’s search engine as a mechanism for pointing users to other sites–an analogy that one judge deemed “unhelpful,” in part because Google was not designed exclusively to facilitate music downloads. The opinion also noted that even the search giant is not always free to link to everything it wishes.
Furthermore, Cooper’s “deliberate choice” to set up the site in such a way that he couldn’t restrict access to copyright files when he could have designed it otherwise rendered him guilty of authorising copyright infringement, the judges said in a multipart opinion.
This is not the first time that linking to illicit material has been deemed illegal. In 2001, a U.S. federal appeals court ruled that a news organization could be prohibited from linking to software that can decrypt DVDs. “The injunction’s linking prohibition validly regulates (2600 Magazine’s) opportunity instantly to enable anyone anywhere to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted movies on DVDs,” the appeals court said. A Dutch court in 1999 reached a similar conclusion.
The Australian judges also agreed with an earlier court ruling determining that E-Talk, the company that hosted the MP3s4free site, and Comcen Internet Services, E-Talk’s parent company, had also broken the law because they did not do enough to stop Cooper from committing copyright violations.
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Pitchfork has gathered 100 awesome music videos for your viewing pleasure.
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MUSIC fans will be able to legally record their CD collections onto iPods and MP3 players under a raft of proposed changes to Federal Government copyright laws.
Taping TV and radio programs and using copyright material for parody or satire will also be legalised as part of the reforms.
And in a move expected to be welcomed by artists, the Government plans to introduce new enforcement measures to combat piracy.
The changes are part of a major overhaul of copyright laws to be announced today by Attorney-General Philip Ruddock in response to millions of Australians who effectively break the law every time they reproduce copyright material for personal use.
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UPDATE: [Link] (It happened)
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Pope Benedict XVI got an iPod on Friday, thanks to a group of workers at Vatican Radio.
According to a Catholic News Service story, the pontiff got a 2GB white Nano, loaded with, among other things, the radio station’s programming in English, Italian and German, as well as classical tunes from Mozart, Chopin and Stravinsky.
The Nano was given to the Pope following a visit to Vatican Radio, CNS reported.
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Pandora is a new web based program created by the Music Genome Project.
It’s simple as telling it what bands you like.
The program then checks its reference list for bands with the same musical qualities, such as tempo, instruments, genre, vocal patterns and producers. It then puts them all into a playlist for you to tell Pandora if you like it or not.
It then allows you to keep a specific list of favourite artists and songs, and it uses all the similarities of the songs you like to find more of that exact type of music.
One of the more fun things about Pandora is the fact you can look at celebrity playlists to find what music specific artists or actors enjoy.
[Link]
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Today is Australia Day, and you know what that means!
Okay, yes it does mean getting the day off work for no other reason than to celebrate being Australian. Yes, alright, it does mean getting extremely intoxicated in the name of patriotism. Okay and yes, it also means lots of barbeques (hold the shrimp, please).
But, most importantly, it means Triple J is counting down the Hottest 100 songs of 2005!
For all our international readers, Triple J is a nation-wide, non-commercial, youth radio station that plays the best new/independent music from both sides of the hemisphere.
Their Hottest 100 annual poll has been running for over 15 years now, showcasing the best and most popular alternative music from Australia and across the globe. It is one of the largest public music polls in the world and attracted over 606,000 votes this countdown (136,060 more than the last one). It is also one of the only reasons I haven’t thrown out my FM radio yet.
Australians: Find the frequency your radio should already be set to by clicking here.
Internationals (and Australians that don’t have/can’t be bothered getting an FM radio): click here to listen online!
The countdown starts at 10am 26 January 2006 (GMT +10:00, Australia - Queensland - Brisbane). I can’t be fucked working out when that is in your own time zone, so click here and do it yourself you lazy pricks.
However, good on you for embodying the true Aussie spirit.
[Triple J website] [Hottest 100 website]
UPDATE: The countdown is over, the complete list can be found here.
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