Australia has just proven yet again that they’ve been duped via trade agreements into bring in the US’s toughest copyright and IP laws, without the native “Fair Use” laws that protect consumers in the US. An Australian court has just found Stephen Cooper, a man who hosted a site that linked to other peoples content, of copyright infringement. ‘

This seems to mean that in Australia, you need not actually commit any infringement at all. All you need do to land yourself in trouble is link to a site that contains infringing content and you are apparently guilty of doing it yourself. The prospect of accident linking could open a world of litigation for Australia’s which should delight the record companies and lawyers, but dismay everybody else. After all, there is a ton of legal digital music files available on the web and apparently we are all supposed to know the difference.

So there you go folks, in Australia, that great bastion of freedom and democracy down under, it is not only illegal to put your own purchased music onto a digital music player, it might be illegal to even sell such devices over here. Now we have the new idiocy where you can land yourself in court just for linking to another sites content.

This article was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 5:44 am