It was only a matter of time: a University of New South Wales student has been prosecuted for operating a website that distributed “pirated” music.

I first heard about this on the fibreculture list, where people more knowledgeable than I about this stuff are building an interesting discussion about the implications. One point raised there is that there is a conflict between some of the research interests of the university and the long and heavy arm of the law: UNSW runs interesting copyright courses in law, and more worryingly, part of the evidence against the guy was his term paper on “open source software licensing”…what’s next – anti-RIAA blog posts as evidence of illegal intent when the blogger gets busted for downloading some played-to-death Beatles song?? (people can waste their bandwidth on anything, it’s OK by me).

Plus, Jill reports that Shelley Powers has gotten stung by the taxman on the basis of blogging “evidence” that she was earning more than she had owned up to, or something. This is very, very scary – and the above example proves I can no longer say, with a snort, “only in America”. But it certainly brings home the point that while the production circumstances of the blog are private and we assume the consequences are trivial, the interpretation of our content is unpredictable.

Maybe Rebecca isn’t being overly cautious after all when she considers killing off her (excellent) blog for fear that her rampant honesty about her human indulgences will somehow spawn consequences outside her control.