Australian court rules against MP3 link site

Linking to copyright music posted elsewhere online without permission can be illegal, an Australian appeals court ruled Monday.

The issue before a three-judge panel at the Federal Court of Australia was whether Stephen Cooper, a retired policeman who ran the now-defunct site MP3s4free.net, was legally allowed to post links to mostly copyright MP3 files hosted on other servers. Cooper does not appear to have hosted any copyright music on MP3s4free.net.

Cooper, a resident of the state of Queensland, had argued that he had no power to prevent illegal copying because users could "automatically" add links to the site without his control. He likened his site to Google's search engine as a mechanism for pointing users to other sites--an analogy that one judge deemed "unhelpful," in part because Google was not designed exclusively to facilitate music downloads.