The Chilling Effects Of A No Linking To Infringing Content Rule
from the not-such-a-good-idea dept
Last Friday, we wrote about Fox's decision to send a cease-and-desist letter to a site that linked to (but did not host) videos of various TV shows. It was, basically, an aggregator of TV shows -- which could be quite useful if you wanted to see old episodes or catch up on an episode you missed. The question at hand, though, was whether or not this was a violation of copyrights. Simply linking to copyright infringement is not, by itself, against the law -- though, there do appear to be some situations where courts view it otherwise (see the 2600 case decision for example). In this case, it's possible that, based on the Supreme Court's decision last year in the Grokster case, this site could be seen as "inducing" infringement -- since all it does is aggregate and point to content that most likely infringes copyright. Even if you disagree with that concept, it's certainly how the case could be stronger than some suspect. Cory Doctorow, at BoingBoing doesn't acknowledge this possibility in a post about the case, but does point out a good reason why such a finding would be bad for everyone. He points out that some folks at Wikipedia are worried about linking to copyright infringing content on YouTube and suggesting that Wikipedia almost never allow YouTube links. This is a perfect example of the "chilling effects" that rulings like this have. There is a ton of content on YouTube that is perfectly legitimate and non-infringing. There are also cases where copyrighted content on the site may be covered under fair use. But, now when you see people suggesting that linking to such content represents a risk and should be stopped, you see the kind of activities that get stopped not because the law says it's illegal, but because of the fear that it might possibly be illegal.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Harsh
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Grow Up! and more
To the point:
Take down the infringing content! (if it does not conform to fair use, of course) Don't go after the person who didn't actually infringe on anything. Also, how is the linking party supposed to know that the content is infringing (at least for the situations that are not totally obvious). Site-wide bans (Wiki --> YouTube) are not the answer. Also, that court ruling is scary.
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no, we are not seven
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On the other hand: Sites like boingboing.net are making $1million a year using other peoples content.
source: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/09/01/8384325/ (3rd paragraph)
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Wikibrary.
Oh, IANAL, and am usually borderline retarded, so if I just said something exceptionally dull, correct me and we can move on. :)
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Ok now, infringing later?
The bottom line is that linking is not the actual problem, it's hosting.
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Re:
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If linking is a problem, just say that the information is available, and post a google link, or reccomend a search term (even better, because then they have to open a new tab, copy-paste it into the search box, and hit the hourglass, which requires one click and theree key presses or more clicks, before they have to find the page. of course, if you make the search term you reccomend specific enough, then they can get just one page).
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