Court ruling: Linking equals piracy

[elektro80]

Norway court upholds Napster conviction

OSLO, Norway --[ THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ]
Norway's supreme court ruled Thursday that a student whose Napster.no homepage was linked to free Internet music files must compensate the music industry.


The country's highest court upheld a lower court ruling that ordered the student to pay $15,900 in compensation. The published version of the court ruling withheld the student's name.


The student was learning computer engineering in the southern Norway town of Lillehammer when he set up the Napster.no site as part of a school project in 2001. His site had nothing do with the widely known Napster.com music site in the United States.


The Napster.no site provided links to music files in the MP3 format that could be downloaded for free. The site was online between August and November 2001, and provided links to about 170 free music files on servers outside Norway, the ruling said.


The music industry group Tono, Sony Music Entertainment Norway AS, Universal Music AS and others, saw the case as an important test of principle, and filed a legal complaint for copyright violations.


A lower court found for the music industry, while on appeal the Lagmannsetten court in Oslo cleared the student, saying any copyright violation occurred when others posted the music and not when he provided links to it.


In a summary of its ruling, the supreme court said the music was clearly published in violation of copyright law.


"The supreme court decided the case based on responsibility for abetting (an illegal act)," the summary said.


It said the student violated the law by showing people where to find the illegal music and that his actions "were premeditated and worthy of criticism."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/aptech_story.asp?category=1700&slug=Norway%20Napster%20Ruling

[mosc]

Did they sue Yahoo and Google too?

This discounts my impression that Norway is an enlightened country. I strongly support copyrights, but making a student pay for posting a link to a site that has illegal postings is wrong. Certainly he should be ordered to remove the links and fined if he didn't comply, but this is selective justice. The music industry here is acting shamelessly - going to the courts to establish principle with a case against a poor student who probably can't even afford suitable legal representation.

Maybe we should boycott Sony or something...

[elektro80]

The same has already happened in France, the US, Australia and Germany. Similar cases are on their way to court in the UK, Japan and Spain.
Some years ago the rulings would focus on the actual site the files were on and who actually did it. Not so anymore. If someone is to blame for this shift in reasoning it is the music biz industry. I posted somewhere else a notice about the new practice of how webradio urls are handled by the copyright management orgs. My "Blame Siemens" post pretty much adds to the confusion. A PC manufacturer is being billed for piracy acts comitted by the end user.. and they are doing this in advance. Hey, this is precrime the PKD way!

[seraph]

[elektro80]

hmm.. that sounds alarmingly like reality...