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Aussie Stephen Cooper has been found guilty of infringing copyright on his mp3s4free website because he provided links to illegal copies of commercial recordings.

But get this -- not only was Cooper smacked by the law, so was the ISP that hosted his site.

Before we all start crying about how unfair this might be, it would pay to reflect on the facts for a moment.

No, Cooper didn't host illegal recordings but he did quite clearly aid and abet any act of piracy that might have occurred if someone followed the links from his website. To be honest, I have to agree with the law when it suggests that this does represent copyright infringement -- although I'd have to say it should be considered to be "in the second degree" and therefore carry less of a penalty than the actual act of piracy itself.

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One would also have to assume that Cooper and his ISP had received warnings to take down the links. If this was the case, and they chose not to, then they're guilty of stupidity -- and that ought to carry its own penalties anyway.

Of course this case raises the thorny old issue of indirection.

A precedent has been set which says that linking to illegal material is in itself illegal. But what about linking to sites that, in turn, link to illegal material?

Being once removed from the material is insufficient to provide protection against prosecution -- but what about being twice, thrice or four times removed?

Exactly where does the line get drawn?

Any smart judge would obviously consider the issue of intent when making such a decision.

If a website (or chain of indirection sites) is set up with the primary objective of providing people with access to illegal material then those sites and their operators would all be equally culpable.

If however, a site links to another site for some other purpose, yet that second site has links to illegal material, then it would be hard to justify a case for prosecution.

Ultimately the whole situation has to boil down to commonsense and fortunately, our courts seem to (by and large) be lucky enough to have plenty of that.

Unfortunately, the same can't always be said for our legislators.

Touch but don't look???
Take the case of our friendly kid-fiddler politician, Graham Capell. He got nine years for actually assaulting and raping children in a series of offenses that, given his position and moralistic stance, must be considered to be at the upper end of the scale.

Contrast this relatively light (out in 4.5 years) sentence with the recent amendment to the Films, Videos and Publications Act which means that the mere possession of "objectionable" images of young children (ie: kiddy porn downloaded from the Net) could get you TEN years in clink.

Does this not seem a little inequitable? Surely those who practice one-on-one child sex-abuse ought to be up for more jail time than those who download pictures of naked pre-teens from the Net.

Sure, slam the kiddy-porn perverts but let's not get so carried away with legislating against the Net that we make the act of "looking" subject to harsher penalties than the hideous act being depicted in such images.

Lighten Up
Time for a long-overdue does of levity and light-hearted material from the web.

I bet you could sell a fist-full of these signs in NZ right now. Looks like something that OSH would dream up eh?

And here's a great example of why children and black marker pens do not mix. Gives the old game of "tag" a whole new meaning doesn't it?

Finally, have you seen those really cool jet-powered model aeroplanes that people build these days? They have real gas-turbine engines and many of them cost upwards of $10K. Most of us would be extremely careful about how and where we flew such an expensive toy but -- if you live in the UAE then "it's just money". (WMV video)

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