Norwegian student fined for MP3 links

Found on The Register on Saturday, 29 January 2005
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Norwegian student Frank Allan Bruvik has been fined $15,900 for providing links from his website, Napster.no, to MP3 files hosted elsewhere, the Associated Press reports.

The Court found that he had violated copyright law by helping netizens to locate forbidden files. In other words, by linking, Bruvik was assisting in an illegal act.

An appeals court earlier had found that he did not violate copyrights because he did not host, or "publish", the files, but merely made reference to sites where the files were already accessible. Those who had actually published the files are the ones liable:

"The Court of Appeals finds that copyright infringement violating the rights of the copyright holders were committed when the works were made accessible for the public by those who uploaded the files to an open network of computers."

The High Court reversed the appellate decision, and left the case as it was decided by the original district court.

Linking to other sources should never be illegal; the decision is a violation of the right for free speech in my opinion. As soon as courts begin to fine people for links, authors while start to hesitate when it comes to linking. And that's the beginning of the end of information distribution. That decision would mean that every webmaster has to review the links every few weeks to make sure they are not pointing to anything copyrighted. For those who say that he was probably linking directly to the files: it's not that far away.