peteg's blog - noise - 2006 12 20 AusCopyright

A pointer to an object is the object.

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What a great piece of reportage from the Smage. I quote:

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.

Of course they mean that the recording industry can go after people who link to material for which the recording industry owns the copyright. Repeat after me: there is one homogeneous recording industry, which speaks with one voice. Further down, the EFA says:

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."

That's a bit strange; how can I give someone permission to infringe someone else's copyright?

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.

Hmm... it's good to know that Google doesn't index torrents... or perhaps pointers-to-pointers are OK. In any case this is precisely what the new copyright laws were predicted to lead to.