March 4th, 2005

Filed under:
Politics
5 Comments »

Hypertext Linking Does Not Violate Copyright

Briefly, from Boing Boing, American asshat Bill O’Reilly laughably wants somebody to stop linking to his column:

But in a move reminiscent of O’Reilly, himself, the company quickly launched a new attack: “Creators Syndicate demands that you immediately cease and desist from your unauthorized use of the link to Bill O’Reilly’s column on his website.”

As this decision states, there’s no legal grounds for this request. They ought to know better than to tempt the Internet fates. Now everybody’s going to link to his column.

Comments: 5 Responses so far

Brian Jones
March 4th, 2005
12:15 pm

It’s probably just a clever scheme to get more people to link to him, and thus increase his Google search engine rankings.

hmm… gives me ideas. :)

Brian.

[Reply]

donna
March 4th, 2005
12:29 pm

heh, I had a similar problem with a psycho lady who was listed on web-goddess.net. She tried to get my website and my internet connection shut down. Both my host and my ISP laughed at her. :)

[Reply]

Alan
March 4th, 2005
12:32 pm

Linking and the former concern for “deep linking” were the subject of UK court cases in the early and mid-90s. Shetland newspapers were one set of the culprits as I recall and they settled out of court so not legal rule was set. We have since become accustomed to the habit of free-wheeling linking but that does mean a court one day could not place a limit on it.

[Reply]

Paul Allen
March 5th, 2005
7:57 am

I agree with the first comment, I think the falafel bandit doth protest too much, he’s savvy enough that he knows it will goad peeps into defying him and viola! Free advertising for him.

[Reply]

David Shipp
March 8th, 2005
2:49 am

The MCPS/PRS who license music for radio play in the UK have a license that you must download, sign and post back to them if you want to link to their website. A quick look at the license indicates that they are probably worried about pirate music websites poking fun at them and linking to them! Some people just don’t understand the Internet.

[Reply]

Add a comment