A Most Troubling Copyright Case
Australia is about to lead the pack in a technically (not rationally) argued legal case that will cause terrible repercussions.
David Neiger in APC Magazine reports today that the Australian Federation against Copyright Theft (“AFACT”) case against iiNet will be argued like this:
“iiNet infringed copyright by virtue of making copies of infringing material either in their cache or even by virtue of being stored temporarily in their routers.” Ian McDonald, the Senior Legal Officer at the Australian Copyright Council
Are you kidding me?!
And you know what? They might win because technically it is correct. But it is also technically correct that the postman temporarily stores illegal things in his bag sometimes without knowing it. Sure he could open all the mail in case bad things were inside, but we have decided as a society that this is very bad.
If they win this, there will be others that see opportunity in an ISP’s caches.
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I am a proud co-founder of
Yeah, core issue at hand here. Thanks for sharing.
This, along with the Australian censorship proposals, are terrible signals for the dot com industry in Australia. Why would we base ourselves here when these sorts of draconian efforts can cripple everything we do?
I thought this was ridiculous also… myself and a few mates have a casual blog here:
http://howboutghostmutt.blogspot.com/search?q=iinet
My comments at the time were less eloquent than yours Phil:
“haha – next they will be suing Telstra for allowing people to discuss crime on the phone?! Or Xerox for allowing people to photocopy a copyrighted book. What a bunch of dickheads [re: the lawyers]“