Norway's Supreme Court has ruled against teenager Frank Allan Bruvik in a copyright case relating to MP3 linking. In 2001, defendant Bruvik developed a website for a school project that was hosted at the URL www.napster.no. Unlike Napster and other P2P file-sharing programs, the amount of illegal content available through the site was limited. In fact, there was no illegal content available on the site.
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Confused? Bruvik's site functioned as an intermediate. Users of his site would submit links to the site specifying the web location of MP3 files, including various copyrighted works. It's important to note, however, that none of this illegal data was hosted by the defendant. Napster.no merely provided browsable links to other hosts which provided illegal content.
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The court ruled that by this mere act of linking to illegal content, the defendant violated Norway's copyright legislation. While the headline may not seem noteworthy with the ongoing RIAA witch hunt, the legal precedent established by this case is of great concern ­­- things are never "cut and dry".