On Sun, Dec 31, 2006 at 10:20:05AM +0200, Ira Abramov wrote: > Not the Israeli law. In Israel it's still legal to link to illegal > things, I think (though the lionetwork site precedence may overturn > this. Must ask Haim Ravia).
It's not illegal anywhere (yet) as long as your intent is not to foster the breaking of the law. For example, since someone asked about sites that stream Israeli video, it's legal, even in the U.S. to list them. It would be illegal (in some places) to list (or sell access) to sites that are obviously pirate sites, such as Bittorrent sites listing recorded programs, etc. The real problem was sites like "moviesadvanced.com" which charged you money for access to bittorrents for pirated movies and made it seem that you were buying a license to download them. It was extended by a court to sites that don't charge you, but still perform the same function. There was one site in eastern Europe where the owner claimed he was being sued by the RIAA and others and soliticed donations for his legal defense. It turned out it was a scam, he collected a lot of money, closed his site and disappeared. There never was any legal action taken or threatened. > HOWEVER, Linking to illegal stuff in OTHER countries, mainly the USA but > probably also some of the EU, Aussieland and other places, may be a > criminal offence. IANAIL (not an International lawyer) - maybe consult > the EFF or groklaw. It's also a question of how. If you mention in an email that you found a site that streams Israeli TV, or qoute a Y-NET article, etc then no one is going to bother you. If you put up a web site with a list of streaming sites, you might get in trouble, and if you charge for access to the list, you definately will get in trouble. > oh yeah, on that note, have an optimisticly happy new year. May this > year see the easing of patent laws in particular (which country will be > the first to brave abolishing them completely?) and IP laws in general. > At the very least, may the DMCA and its copycats (copy acts?) be deemed > unconstitutional and undemocratic. You have no idea of what you are asking. Think carefully of what a world without patents and copyrights would be like. No GPL, no investment in software. Companies taking your hard work and selling it without compensation, leaving you no legal recourse. And while we are at it, why should we pay you to work for us anyway? We can get the same thing for free from the Internet. If it does not exist today, we can just start an open source project and people will enhance and debug it for free. As someome who had years of his and other's work stolen by Koreans who committed industrial espionage and fraud, I'm very happy that we have software patents pending. It's what kept them from doing exactly what we had done. As for copyrights, without them, the GPL would be worthless. It seems to be anyway, the outcome of our last discussion was that the original program was released with a great deal of fanfare as being GPL and when the company was offered money for propritary licenses, they issued version 2, which was the same as version one, but the license was not longer strictly GPL. Same code, much of which was submitted by the contributors with no compensation except the promise it would remain free. One person on the list said that it was "ancient history" and no longer mattered. It happened about a year ago. While I am a firm supporter in open source and public domain programs, I'm also a realist. While we need software patents and copyrights, I do agree the 100 year copyrights and the DMCA go to far. But then in the 1970's we never thought that 99/365 expirtation dates were a problem. I was reminded of all of this because someone on another list posted a book to give away. One of it's authors was the first documented person to steal code I had written. I wrote the program in April 1973, and had given him a copy. In those days, you need to send a printed listing of the program and $100 to the U.S. government to copyright it, so I didn't. I probably would not of anyway, I had written many "public domain" programs before (and since) then. In June I applied for a job at the place he worked and used it as an example of my skill and understanding of the internals of the operating system. His boss showed me the exact same listing, with my name replaced with his, and the date being May. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
