I just can’t figure out what is going on with this world. The overwhelming stupidity of the people in power scares me. The courts in Australia just ruled that linking to infringing work is in itself an infringement. Now I don’t really know anything about Australian law, but that just seems wrong.
It’s true that we had this big crackdown on torrent sites here in the US, but as far as I know none of these cases actually went to court. Most of these webmasters simply got scared after the cease and desist letters and pulled the plug on the trackers site way before the case could go to court.
What is the crime here? I can’t figure this out… Did he distribute the infringing work? No. He was just linking to the sites that did… Well, I guess now after that idiotic Gorkster ruling the US law could also find him guilty…
Never mind the guy though… What kills me here is that ISP got in trouble for this too. How did that happen? Does that means that now all ISP’s are liable for infringement committed by their subscribers? How does this apply to search engines? Could google be found guilty by proxy for indexing an infringing website? We know this might become reality in Canada soon (remember this thing?)
Maybe google will soon have to serve special versions of their pages at google.au and google.ca with some click through warning, and disclaimer or something?
