Media

This Way to the Egress

For the life of me, I cannot understand how a rational court can find a hyperlink to be anything but a pointer. Are phone books illegal because they publish phone numbers which permit you to directly contact an individual?

In this case, the law in question, the Database Directive (1996), had already prohibited hyperlinks — assuming Wired's rendition is accurate.

The directive also protects against the "unfair extraction" of materials contained in a database, specifically mentioning downloading or hyperlinking as examples of prohibited extraction methods.

....

"Temporary reproduction" such as linking and downloading are specifically addressed in the directive, which also gives the database owner the right to control or prohibit any sort of temporary reproduction of all or substantial amounts of the contents of a database.

So, by legislative fiat, a link is defined to be a temporary reproduction, rather than a pointer. This simplifies things, but reflects a mis-understanding of the nature of hyperlinks, much as the lawsuit itself reflects a mis-understanding of the value of hyperlinks.

Hyperlinks are only pointers, but have the character of other things because of the ways that they are used. A web browser, for example, may take a list of pointers and aggregate for display the items on the other side of those pointers. Has this changed the nature of the pointer? They're still just pointers, but the browser has used them to construct a new thing. Is the culpable party in this case the link, or the browser which does something with those links?

Suppose I noted that the coffee pot is in the cafeteria. If you walked up, took a cup of coffee, and didn't leave the $1, who would be at fault?

Mainpost v. NewsClub is even more ridiculous because the entire point of a newspaper is readership.

[A]re you guys as depressed as I am?

Yes, but this week that's because we no longer have free coffee.

1:51:38 PM # Google It!
categories: Law, Media