Following on from my ‘Rich internet applications and accessibility‘ post, I noticed a story about some guy in Queensland being found to have breached copyright by linking to pirated mp3 files hosted on another site. Sounds like a bad decision to me, but perhaps that’s just because I dislike concepts like intention which I can’t easily quantify.

I’m going to leave aside here the whole ‘is copyright a good thing’ argument here. For better or worse, copyright exists in it’s current form and probably will for some time. I’m also going to use the word ’stealing’ for infringing copyright even though my dictionary says stealing is ‘to take someone else’s property’ and no ‘taking’ really occurs.

My first response, as a guy who knows the underlying technology pretty thoroughly, is that this decision is clearly wrong, but reading the article changed my mind somewhat. The turning point was discovering that the site in question was named mp3s4free. I’m guessing it was some sort of advertising driven site which pointed to mp3 files all around the net. Assuming I’m correct, this guy was making money by encouraging people to download these mp3 files hosted elsewhere.

The slashdot crowd came up with some nice one liners supporting the ‘this is stupid’ line…

  • In other news…A man in Queensland was found guilty of pointing at a stolen car in the street….
  • Google et al, had better watch out…

…but I’m not convinced. It’s difficult to define, but there’s a big difference between pointing at something stolen and assisting others in theft. The Google argument is also seductive (to me) but in the end it comes down to intention. Google is certainly not building a business around making it easy for people to infringe copyright, where as the intention behind a site named mp3s4free is pretty clear unless that site happens to be pointing at music which is actually being made freely available by the creator(s).

Intention is a difficult thing to quantify, and I guess that’s why a lot of people who are interested in technology would prefer to ignore it. As soon as intention is brought into the picture, we can no longer be as sure whether XYZ is legal or not until some sort of precedent has been developed, which takes time, and is likely to produce some casualties along the way. Of course, it’s easy to complain, and very difficult to propose solutions.