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Norwegian Student Fined for Online Music Piracy
from the bad-reporting dept
While the story here is about a Norwegian student who has been fined for music piracy, the reason I wanted to post it was to complain about reporters talking about things they don't seem to understand. This article says that the student, Frank Bruvik, broke the law by making "his own version" of Napster's website. Making his own version of the Napster website has nothing to do with music piracy. Napster was a software program that let people share music over the internet. It actually had nothing to do with the web. The article doesn't make it at all clear, but it sounds like this kid just put up a website at Napster.no that had links to song downloads (though, this may not be true). That's completely different from Napster. As for the ruling itself, apparently, the judge said that it's not illegal to download the actual music, just to distribute the links, which seems pretty damn backwards. If anything is illegal at all (and I don't think anything here should be illegal) shouldn't it be the part that actually breaks the copyright law? Either way, he's going to appeal the decision.
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not getting it
Time and time again, there is this tendency from lawmakers, the media, and uninformed people to make all these new laws for the internet--when all it takes is a little common sence to see that on the vast majority of issues, the internet really isn't different that any other media at least from a legal stantpoint.
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Re: not getting it
"If you ask me for drugs and I tell you that you can go buy cocaine from the guy standing over there on the next block...am I breaking the law?"
Obviously, no, I'm not.
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