Judge Rules Against Deep-Linking of Content 418
An anonymous reader writes "A Texas judge has ruled that, if a copyright owner objects to the linking of content from another web site, that link must be taken down. This case, which may have some far-reaching implications, centered around a motorcross website. The site, run by a Robert Davis, provided links directly to live feeds of 'Supercross' events streaming from the SFX Motor Sports site. The company filed suit, claiming that the direct links were denying it advertising revenue. The article cites previous cases, where sites were prohibited by judges from linking to files which violated copyright law (such as DVD decryption software). From the article: 'But in those lawsuits, the file that was the target of the hyperlink actually violated copyright law. What's unusual in the SFX case is that a copyright holder is trying to prohibit a direct link to its own Web site. (There is no evidence that SFX tried technical countermeasures, such as referrer logging and blocking anyone coming from Davis' site.)'"
What is unusual in this case is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cases are decided on the merits of the argument. If you're determined to enter a stupid argument, you're going to lose - the amount of money either side has or validity of the underlying concept doesn't matter at that point..
Re:I thought cases were decided on what the LAW is (Score:5, Insightful)
A judge isn't paid to know every last law on the books. A judge is paid to know how to weigh up separate legal arguments as they are presented to them and conduct additional research if they deem it appropriate.
The content owner presented the argument, "This is my content. He is circumventing the means I have put in place to control access to it. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act says that any attempt to circumvent access control is against the law."
The idiot defended himself with, "But! But! He's Ghengis Khan!"
The judge didn't ignore any laws that were presented to him. He considered the arguments presented and sided with the coherent one.
Now, had the idiot argued that, "The DMCA applies to circumvention of encryption. This was not encrypted and so that argument is invalid. This guy put his content on the net and I linked to it via standard internet norms. That he wanted people to walk down only one path to his content, so he could profit better, doesn't change the fact that another commonly used path existed that he made no attempt to secure." he might have won. Had he hired a lawyer to put many years of training on how to skillfully craft that argument, he'd have been even more likely to have won.
The fact remains, the judge did exactly what judges are supposed to do - he weighed up the arguments as they were presented to him. That the idiot failed to present a cohesive argument means that, yes, he should have lost under the way the U.S. legal system works.
Now you can argue that judges should be required to be case law experts on any case they hear...
Think about that for a moment. Consider the breadth of case law out there. Consider how lawyers already specialize in specific areas because knowing every area, even if you just have a good grounding and do research in specific cases, is all but impossible. Do we want specialist judges? It's a great ideal. But now consider the cost to every county that have to provide separate divorce judges, patent law judges, business law judges, etc. Now a county needs twenty or thirty judicial variants to support what you're asking for.
How do they pay for this? Well, so far, court costs get passed on to the loser. Slashdot readers regularly bitch that the massive cost of losing already makes a legal defense impossible for the common man to risk - hence things like the RIAA settlements. Do you really want to make this situation even worse?
Yes, in an ideal world, everything would be perfect: Judges would be experts on what they heard and the pure, fabulous truth would be all that mattered - and it would somehow all be for free. Back in the real world, a tradeoff has to be made. To ensure realistic access to justice, that balance point has been chosen as: Judges aren't expected to be case law experts, they're expected to weigh up arguments well. You can hire a lawyer to ensure your argument is well presented.
It's not perfect but it's the best system anyone's come up with so far. Under this system, yes, the guy deserved to lose.
Re:What is unusual in this case is... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always seen "deep linking" as linking to an HTML page and getting a lot of bogus gateway pages, search pages, etc. out of the way. Some sites object to that because when you do that instead of linking to their home page, they only get one pageview instead of the 3 or 4 it might take for the user to reach that content. I think we all agree that kind of objection is bogus.
When you source a non-html file off of someone else's server without permission, either by direct linking or embedding it in your own page, it's called leeching.
When Fuddruckers was leeching a flash game off a developer's site [slashdot.org] they were broadly condemned, and he was cheered for serving up brutal photos of cattle mutilation to children who were unlucky enough to go to the Fuddruckers page for the game.
Now I can understand those users who think that the site should have tried this method for reaming the leecher site instead of going the legal route. But no method of content protection is foolproof, and that's not saying it's bad because it might not prevent all leeching, but because you can have false positives. So besides the extra effort of erecting porous walls to prevent content theft, you have the customer service issues with all your legitimate users who generate false positives.
If a content protection scheme would generate 1% false positives, but I had 10,000 uniques a day, then I've got to deal with 20 extra complaints a day (where I might be able to win the customer back) and 80 lost customers who just got offended or frustrated and bailed. In the meantime, the bastard who caused me all this difficulty merely loses the ability to link to my content.
If I take him to court instead, then he has legal costs for defense, legal costs for any damages awarded, a court order preventing him from further leeching (and jail time if I catch him violating it), and I don't have to deal with the cost issues of 100 false positives a day.
- Greg
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, they provided some recourse for someone who was appropriately annoyed that some other guy was enriching the appearance of his site's by 'providing' material to which he doesn't hold a copyright, for which he wasn't paying bandwidth, and so on. Argue all you want about the nuances, but it doesn't pass the smell test, and that's what the court thought, too.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think you meant 'Much like NASCAR.' And interestingly enough, NASA does not sponsor any drivers/teams at NASCAR, that I am aware of.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly it's not a nice thing to do, and I'd be angry if someone did it to me, but wouldn't you prefer that the gallery just to put up curtains (or check the referer header)? Do you really want the courts saying it's illegal to use a telescope across the street from any art gallery?
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-nB
Chicago Cubs (Score:3, Informative)
This reminds me of a case in 2002, in which the Chicago Cubs sued businesses [metafilter.com] that sold access to nearby rooftops where people could watch the games without buying tickets at Wrigley Field.
From what I can tell, they eventually settled out of court.
Analogies are great; everyone should have one (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's say the painter has constructed a maze, that anyone can enter for free. To get to the place to view the painting, one must follow a number of signs that provide directions through the maze. Those signs also have advertising placed on them, such that people viewing those signs might see the ads. Now one person takes the time to walk through the maze and writes down the sequence of turns to make it to the picture; left, straight, right, right, straight. This person then makes copies of those instructions and stands outside the entrance to the maze and offers those instructions to others, effectively allowing them to not look at the maze's directions or ads.
That's a deep link; it gets you to a specific point without having to navigate the intermediate links yourself. If those intermediate points contain ads, then you might not see them. The final links on the plantiff's website seem to be direct links to the audio files, much as the defendant has been accussed of publishing. In the end, the act of listening is the same; if this was a matter of embedded audio with ads on the page, I agree the photograph analogy would be a better fit, since it would be changing the context of presentation of the copyrighted work.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
You miss the point that it isn't the government's job to secure profits for any business or individual.
One can argue that the patent and copyright systems are all about the government securing profit for businesses and individuals.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of non-profit people and organizations that still make use of their copyrights. Not least so that other unscrupulous people can't make money off of their volunteered time, etc. Everyone has those rights to their own work, whether they're personally choosing to make money or not.
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If the owner is really that scared of someone linking to their content, I say don't fucking post it on the Internet.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with this line of thinking is that content isn't "up" on the web for anyone to "see". The server is actively responding to requests for that content by serving it up. Sending a 403 when you don't want to distribute your content isn't actively blocking access -- it's merely not distributing it.
If you configure a server to your distribute content to anyone in the world who asks for it, that's exactly what you're going to get. You don't solve this problem with lawsuits. You solve with with a fucking text editor and a couple of brain cells.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't make anything illegal. This was a civil suit, where one guy was, despite being asked not to, leveraging someone else's material and bandwidth to fatten up his website with owning the content or doing the work or paying the bills. The guy who sued and won had to take an action for this to be stopped by a court, just like any copyright holder would have to in the future... but for now there's a precedent that says (so that everyone can get out of court quicker and spend less on lawyers) "that's some BS, piggybacking on that guy's material and bandwidth, and everyone knows it, so stop now and save us all the same grief in yet another case." Infringing on someone's copyright has always been a no-no. And as usual, it's up to the copyright holder to tell someone to knock it off. This isn't any different. The leech should have just quit while he was ahead, but he's obviously an idiot.
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Correction: This was a civil suit, where one guy was doing exactly what the World Wide Web was designed to do, who nevertheless lost because the judge was apparently a dumbass!
No, what's usual -- and appropriate -- would be fo
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So, Time Magazine should stop putting its magazines on the shelf because otherwise they can't stop you from taking out your digital camera, making a copy of the cover, and using it on your web site as if the artwork were your own material?
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Embedding others' content = bad
Linking to others' content = good
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It certainly isn't clear how copyright law restricts posting a reference to non-infringing published media or documents, so I don't think it is unreasonable that we should expect you to provide some explanation for your claim. Your entire post is just rhetoric and a
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to distribute content to someone, you configure your web server to deny them access to the resource. If you're running a server that's handing out 200 OK in response to requests for content, your server is doing exactly what it's configured to do. If you don't want to? Well, you'd better start handing out some damned 403 Forbiddens instead.
Basically, this judge has given webmasters grounds to sue people in lieu of learning how to do their damned jobs properly.
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Whew! Then it's a good thing that all you have to do is stop pretending you're the source of copyrighted material when you're not, and the problem goes away. There's plenty of precedent to suggest that all an infringer like this has to do is stop when asked to. Piece of cake, and no lawyers, courts, costs, or civil penalties anywhere in site.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
A link isn't a copy of the information it links to. A link is instructions for where to find someone else's server that is willing to give you the information. Outlawing links is like outlawing giving directions.
If someone is linking to your site from outside and that annoys you, the solution isn't to take that person to court -- it's to stop serving data to people coming from outside your site. That's 90% of what the referrer: tag is for.
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The Internet is fine (Score:3, Interesting)
No, you are over-reacting and ignoring numerous prior precedents. The practice is known as Deep Linking and claiming the technical tricks to block such practices mean its OK to do so is liek claiming Spamming through open relays is ok because there are RBL's that might be able to block it.
This decision in no way forbids linking to dee
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Ok, let me try the analogy game. It's like somebody is on the street corner handing out packets of information. Some jerk just down the street is telling people, "Just ask for page 7, the rest is all ads". The guy handing out the information doesn't like this and yells
It's workable (Score:2)
it's not entirely unlike trespassing. I can put up a 20 foot concrete wall topped with razor wire to compell you to knock before you enter. Or I can leave the borders of my property open and put up a nice
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No they didn't. That's a little too close to an reductio ad absurdum argument. They just made being a shithead punishable by fines.
If I ask you to stop direct-linking to my content - content which I pay to transfer - and you don't, you're a shithead, and you should be fined.
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A link isn't a copy of the information it links to. A link is instructions for where to find someone else's server that is willing to give you the information. Outlawing links is like outlawing giving directions.
No, it's not quite that simple. Things like frames make it easy to be deceptive with links. Let's toss out everything we know about physics for a second and consider this scenario:
Suppose I have a brick and mortar store. Because I am an alien who has total control over spacetime, I am able to
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No, this is like a neighbor running a business that depends on people thinking he's cool and has a lot going on, and who helps with that image by giving away the stuff you keep in your back yard, which you otherwise would provide under different circumstances. Who cares how good a fence you could put up if yo
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More nanny state BS (Score:5, Insightful)
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No Big Deal: Wait For The Appeal (Score:2)
What really matters is what happens when these issues reach the appealete (damn lack of spellcheck on IE) courts. By that point hopefully th
Re:No Big Deal: Wait For The Appeal-SPELCHEK! (Score:2)
You have no one other than yourself to blame for this lack of spell-check. The same way the site complaining about deep linking has no one other than themselves to blame since they publicly posted the pages and used none of the measures available to them to prevent deep links.
FireFox 2.0 has an embedded spell-checker for all text boxes.
The Google toolbar for IE includes a spell-check facility.
Ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
A short poem: (Score:5, Funny)
And it is goatse you will see
The end.
Torn here (Score:2)
Still a lawsuit seems un
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Sort of like if your neigbhor keeps plugging his 2kw Christmas display (off of which he makes money!) into your house's exterior outlet, and no matter how many times you ask him to stop, he keeps doing it, and so you have to buy locks, build fences, and eventually hire an electrician to help you? If someone is doing something completely unreasonable (never mind that it costs you money!), why should your
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What's your point? That principle should mean nothing? That the only structure we should have in place to stop people from ripping you off is a physical barrier to their ability to do so? How about a more open situation where most people are reasonable and don't rip you off, and you tell the few people that do to knock
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This is nothing like that. Whatsoever. It's a stupid simile. The difference is that a URL or other network stream that permits connections without checking to see who you are is like a building with an unlocked
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Your logic is heavily flawed. It would be much more like this situation if the guy was embedding their videos on his page. However, he was linking to them. That would be like you putting up a Christmas decoration, and your neighbor putting up a sign, saying ``Look at the decoration next door'', and as a result of this, the concrete next to your house getting worn, and you having to pay to fix it. Can you sue your neighbor for this?
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To work better with your framework, though, it's more like someone cleverly positioning a mirror on their house to make it appear that the neighbor's display is actually his own, and using that illusion to bolster his own reputation among his visitors and prospective advertisors. You really don't have to disect analogies to conclude that the guy -
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An analogy is a tool to present an idea in a more understandable and universal light. It is, IMHO, unfortunate when an analogy presents something incorrectly, as it gives people the wrong idea about the issue.
Now that I think about it, TFA actually never mentioned anything about how these links were presented. If it is more like my example, where the neighbor tells someone to look at the Christmas decoration, then, the plaintiff has no case, IMO. If it is more like your example, then at least they have an
Happy hollidays scenty! (Score:2)
Come come now, I dont think you really need the help of an electrician to flip a circut breaker...
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Like you said, pretty standard countermeasures but in this case these people's understanding of the legal process greatly o
Texas? (Score:2)
This case is in Texas, therefore:
*This, at MOST, only applies to websites in Texas
*This may or may not set a precedent for other websites in other states
*Depending on case-specific issues, this may not set any precedence at all (see earlier post about defendant stupidity)
Is all that right?
That said, this is yet another ridiculous abuse of copyright. Copyright is not supposed to protect "your ability to generate ad revenue".
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Um, that is EXACTLY what copyright is. Copyright gives you the exclusive right to decide how your "information" is used, whether it is a book, a painting or a website. In exchange for protection, you have to give it to the public domain after a fixed number of years, currently 75.
If I write a book/website/etc, I have every expectation that you will not go sell photocopied versions of it without my permission. I wrote it, I get to
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The basis for things like copyright, as explicitly stated in the Constitution, is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." As such, copyright must be designed to do that. If you disagree, you're necessarily claiming that copyright is unconstitutional.
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Copyrights, like patents, are supposed to provide motivation to create, by giving limited protection of the rights for commercial exploitation.
HTH. HAND.
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A Texas Judge? (Score:2, Informative)
this changes things a bit (Score:3, Insightful)
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I've never understood these "What's the difference...?" posts where someone then proceeds to describe two completely different things.
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The difference that matters is, using your example, you're not running a web site and trying to make your site more popular by appearing to have richer content that's really someone else's (and served using that other person's bandwidth!). That's an easy distinction to make, and the judge did it just fine.
Re:this changes things a bit (Score:5, Insightful)
As a general principle, a prohibition on deep linking against the wishes of the linkee is unacceptable because it breaks the net and violates important aspects of free speech. For example, if you want to criticize something that I have posted but you can only link to my homepage, not to the specific post, your ability to criticize is significantly impaired. As far as I can see, there are only three ways in which a deep linkee is hurt: (a) he or she loses ad revenue. Too bad. The law isn't meant to support a specific business model. (b) he or she is not able to ensure that you read other material first. In some cases the motivation for this is good, but it isn't something you can enforce anymore than you can make someone read the introduction to your book before reading chapter 1. At best you can include on deep pages links to higher pages with an explanation as to why people should go there. (c) the linkee ends up paying for the bandwidth consumed by people downloading audio and video.
This last is a legitimate issue. The solution, however, is either to improve the technology to the point that the costs are negligible or to find a way of charging the downloader for bandwidth costs.
I can't believe it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I can't believe it... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess CmdrTaco should get the death penalty for all those links to copyrighted content he posts on this site.
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I'm really amazed at the ignorance of your response. Making something accessible in the real world doesn't mean that you have permission to take it away. But making some data accessible on the internet and without access control mechanisms absolutely gives you permission to use and consume it.
It's obviously not theft - it's not stealing - becaus
it's their own dang fault... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just look at the more savvy porn sites... they've started using referrers to make sure the images is being loaded from their site, but the more trickier ones are actually making sure that the image you want to look at was first loaded by the detail page that it was meant to be served from. It's made directory browsing terribly hard lately...
But either way, these morons would rather throw money at lawyers, and making people shell over money and such things, rather than tightening the technology of their own house. They define the rules, but with all those front doors openly accessible, they don't like it when people use them.
Many shops have doors out in the back alley... if you don't want people to use it, lock it, stupid!
Where Does It End? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well thats the logic/laws that they take bittorrent trackers down with.
Texas ignorance and arrogance again (Score:2)
Another ignorant [stickergiant.com] influence coming from Texas.
The proper defense against deep linking is technical. A judge should not get involved.
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WRONG.
Just like the proper defense against spam is technical right? If you don't like spam, it's the fault of the ISP because they can't filter it well enough right? Never mind that spammers steal resources, infect computers, violate privacy, and drive up the cost of everyone's service and drive down the performance. It's the fault of the providers for not implementing tighter security in lieu of enforcing legitimate laws regarding theft?
Your rational
Texas Justice (Score:2)
And make posting messages to maillists with 40-line ".sigs" threatening torture and nuke attack when anyone redistributes some message posted from some c
The question on everyone's mind is... (Score:2)
(I always linked to the advertisement view from my blog, just out of fairness.)
Killing the messenger (Score:2)
robots.txt (Score:2)
The biggest problem I see here is that these issues are being decided by judges who never attended a Computer Science class in thei
Here's a little clue for said judge (Score:4, Insightful)
IF someone includes a link in their writing to what is supposed to be a specific item of interest, but cannot because of rulings such as this one, they're forced to leave a link to the home page of the web site instead. Does anyone honestly think users are going to waste their valuable time trying to locate the item of interest being referenced by the writer? When I'm confronted with these kinds of links, the very next click is on the "close" button.
Don't Mess with Texas! (Score:2)
Note: this is NOT a final ruling (Score:2)
TFA was misleading when it said "A federal judge in Texas has ruled that it is unlawful to provide a hyperlink to a Webcast if the copyright owner objects to it." That is borderline lying, IMHO. A preliminary injunction is a temporary order.
Things like restraining orders and preliminary injunctions are granted if they appear to have merit, without a full hearing, in order to prevent major injury.
This isn't such a big deal. (Score:2)
This isn't really such a big deal. It is the decision of a trial court, not an appellate court, and so does not establish any kind of binding precedent. Moreover, it looks like it wasn't a good test of the merits of the case. The linker represented himself and apparently threw a tantrum instead of presenting a competent defense.
window shopping (Score:2)
You look in the window but, like some stores, there is no curtain behind the maniquens(sp).
You therefore can see throughout the store.
You can even see to the end, past the perfume counters.
You can order the product online and avoid the perfume and hence potential to buy it.
With deep-linking illegal it is like forcing you to go to the other end even if you can see there.
Haven't RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Linking, at its most basic level, is not stealing. It's not even copyright infringement. A link is merely a reference to an existing resource. Nothing more. By linking to the PDF of your book on your website, I'm no more infringing your copyright than if I told someone where to find a free copy (perhaps in the free box of a yard sale.)
A lot of individuals seem to think that anything that prevents them from making money from their work is inherently a violation of their copyright, but I'm sorry. The internet just doesn't work that way. If you want to protect your work, put it behind some kind of basic barrier (a login, a CAPCHA, something.) Then you can sue deep linkers under the DMCA for circumventing your copyright protection mechanism. A blanket ruling stating that any webmaster can object to and remove a link to any "deep" (read: non-home) page on his site is just a bad idea. Many website TOS's already (unenforceably) forbid deep linking. If this ruling spreads, any website that generates ad revenue, or relies on branding, will start adopting similar language. And since that constitutes about 85%* of the useful web, this is unquestionably bad.
Some people can't seem to understand the role deep linking plays in the useful web. Almost any informational article or resource of any length references very specific pages on other websites. This type of thinking will eventually require any web developer to do careful research on any website he wants to link to, checking their TOS policies to find out if deep linking is illegal.
Now, one slightly more rational view seems to be that one can safely deep link, and need only remove links when a content owner specifically objects. Other more disturbing views insinuate that a web developer should "just send an e-mail" before he establishes a deep link. This would turn every website article into an arduous process of research and documentation, cataloging permission for every link in every page.
Eventually, this will lead to the web being broken down into mostly web sites linking to the homepages of other websites. References in articles will become like this [domain.com] (Click on Articles, click in the search box and type 'Pandas'. Go to page 3, click the 3rd article from the top ('Panda Lifecycle'.) The search results may be different, so you might have to hunt around.)
If you disagree, you obviously don't understand the nature of the web. To those of you who argue that "everyone should just be reasonable", nobody is ever reasonable when it comes to money. And believe me, the web is now very much about money.
Now, I'm not talking specifically about this ruling, which may or may not embody all of the above ideas. I'm speaking more to the concept of conflating deep linking with theft, and many of the ideas and beliefs which have been espoused in this thread. The bottom line, this is a technical problem that requires a (simple and inexpensive) technical solution. Attempting to involve the courts will only harm the useful web.
* Source: My Ass
The logical next step. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Already? We're still waiting for them to return from the break they started taking in 1999.
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As for blocking, I'll just type the URLs without the anchor and write a 'find url' plugin for all major browsers for those who can't be bothered to copy and paste.
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Yet if you take 100 URLs, and ask a bunch of random webmasters which are "deep links" and which are not, they will generally almost all classify the same subset as "deep links". If your theory were correct, this would not be so.
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as to whether or not hotlinking content is illegal, the issue is not settled legally as it has gone both ways in different cases, in this case the defendant represented himself, so it's a pretty weak precident
if you want to share your content and not be hotlinked there are ways to prevent that, just as if you want to keep people from waling into your yard in most states you have to take measures to prevent that, such a
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Guess English is a little harder than you thought.
Gotcha back.
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You could argue their image service may possibly be "deep linking" but I bet Google is actively trying to find ways to identify content that is less restricted so it doesn't infringe upon anyone's copyrights. And even with Google images, they link to the referring page directly. It's really ignorant and naive to generalize deep linking with other forms of legitimate linking.
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perhaps?!
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The judge is an idiot, too. He/she seems to have no clue whatsoever about the implication of this decision.
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The internet is almost based on hyperlinks, you're expected to have them, to the extent that technologies like Google's is -based- around it. If you don't want to go by that, you have to explicitely do something against it: "close the
I don't think the law says what you think it says (Score:2)
If my house sits between a street and a public beach, it's illegal for someone to tresspass on my property to reach the beach from the street. But unless I actually take measures to prevent them, up to and including putting up a fence and a locked gate, not only can they do so with impunity but I can lose the right to implement such measures. In fact a couple of times when we lived in Sydney I had to go all the way around the block to get
Re:Sit down kids and let me tell you a bed time st (Score:3, Interesting)
Waaa! My business model is flawed. Please Mr. Judge, make him stop!
If they really want to be serious about selling ad space and making money off it - the ads go IN the movie. Yeah it's more work, but I can promise you can charge more and avoid this problem. Oh - you just wanted little links for people to click on eh? Don't really care if the people want the
Re:Sit down kids and let me tell you a bed time st (Score:2)
About your squirrel movie example - if you haven't figured out that if people like it so much they are willing to pay to see it and you still give it away for free, then you deserve to be bankrupt. Don't try to bust your head making money off squirrel dolls and squirrel tapes etc that the people DON'T want. You charge for what the people DO want, and you charge as much as you can get away with.