Norway's bearded and wigged ones have thrown a live hand-grenade into the search engine industry by ruling that publishing hyperlinks of stolen MP3s on websites is as illegal as piracy.

The country’s Supreme Court has upheld a lower court's earlier ruling about a teenager named Frank Allan Bruvik who fell foul of Tono, the music industry's lobby group in Norway.

His site called napster.no allowed users to submit links to MP3 files. It soon became a list of links to MP3 files across the Web.

But as the site After Dawn comments, here, the Judges' ruling does set a somewhat strange precedent.

It means that in Norway, Google can be sued, closed down and its owners thrown into jail because it provides links to sites that distribute cracks, and illegal audio copies.

It will cost Bruvik a heap of money in fines, who knows what will happen to Google, Yahoo, and MSN?


Source : TheInquirer

There is a difference between indexing everything found, as it would be impractical for the large search engines to exclude everything that there is some disagreement with, and they have fought bitterly to make such attempts futile.

Eg. the "Kazaa Lite" incident, where on beng forced to remove links to Kazaa Lite, they linked the material telling which links they had to remove.

Pure robot indexing needs to have immunity, or the increased workload would mean the only free searches would be for paid results.

(in reply to SiliconFreak)

i also read the story about heise.de that warned to remove links to anydvd, i am wondering what the freedom of internet has become, a utopia?

(in reply to Matthew)

Yes, I believe that in a year or so...Internet freedom will move back from 21st century into Stone-age...Flintstones where are You?

(in reply to emperor)