It’s not often that I look negatively upon Australia. I still consider it home. This latest court ruling, however suggests a backward thinking mentality we usually laugh at Americans for having.

“A court ruling has given the recording industry the green light to go after individuals who link to material from their websites, blogs or MySpace pages that is protected by copyright.

A full bench of the Federal Court yesterday upheld an earlier ruling that Stephen Cooper, the operator of mp3s4free.net, as well as the internet service provider that hosted the website, were guilty of authorising copyright infringement because they provided a search engine through which a user could illegally download MP3 files.”

It seems we have our own “series of tubes” folks who don’t really get this new medium. Nice how the recording companies are going after the little guys once again too. Check the full story.