Judge Rules Against Deep-Linking of Content

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.)'"

Comments

What is unusual in this case is...

[nick_davison]

The moron chose to defend himself and likened the other party to Ghengis Khan.

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:What is unusual in this case is...

[Swimport]

validity of the underlying concept doesn't matter at that point.

Sad, but true.

Re:What is unusual in this case is...

[b.burl]

Unless you've read the decision and/or the transcripts and you have the expertise, simply dismissing the case based on self defense and the use of a similie is a little arrogant. Maybe you're right, but maybe you're not.

Re:What is unusual in this case is...

[gbulmash]

Beside that, the guy wasn't "deep linking" to a page. He was linking directly to the audio file, so that the user was never actually sent to the site. Their media player came up and played the file and the originating site never got the page view or access to the user.

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 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

Re:What is unusual in this case is...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Beside that, the guy wasn't "deep linking" to a page. He was linking directly to the audio file, so that the user was never actually sent to the site."

Call it whatever you want; content posted on the web is addressed by URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) which are basically address cards. When you make a piece of content publicly available, assigning it a URL and letting the public download it, you have no right demanding legal restitution or restraint when someone actually hands out that address.

"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."

Yes, good for you -- you've saved your business money, and simultaneously exploited a technically ignorant legal system to subvert the fundamental basis of the Internet.

The "legal route" is not an alternative to be casually chosen whenever you desire something. And in this case, it's not even slightly legitimate.

Re:What is unusual in this case is...

[x2A]

Your opinion would *very* quickly change if you were the one paying the bandwidth bill.

Re:What is unusual in this case is...

[fatphil]

"He was linking directly to the audio file, so that the user was never actually sent to the site."

This isn't insightful, this is codswallop.

Where do you think that audio file actually comes from - thin air?
It was quite obviously deep linking, and it should *never* be considered illegal. Servers have the right to refuse any request. If they detect that the intended route to the file has not been followed, then they can 403 the request. If they are too stupid, and serve the request, that's their own stupid fault. No 'breaking in' has taken place, no offence at all has taken place.

FatPhil

Re:What is unusual in this case is...

[starwed]

How, exactly, do you think major sites handle this? They don't sue deeplinkers, they take technical measures to prevent them from hotlinking to media files. His opinion isn't that hotlinking shouldn't be stopped, but that one shouldn't resort to the court system to stop it.

Re:What is unusual in this case is...

[cgenman]

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.

Detect where the user is coming from and display the content or don't. The technology is mature, simple, and highly porous. Now, if the other site takes the extra step of hacking through your protection layer by lying about the referrer, then take them to court immediately. They've gone from requesting information IN EXACTLY THE WAY THAT THE INTERNET AND YOUR SERVER HAVE BEEN SETUP TO DO, to outright lying in order to gain access.

Basically, you need to put up a small fence around your property that lets people know what you want them to be able and not able to do with content that you're serving to the world. If you put stuff up on a server that anyone can access, but want to restrict how it is being used, the way to do it properly is to teach your server what you do and don't want it to do. Otherwise, your server is acting in your stead to serve up files to anyone who asks. YOU are giving files to anyone who asks. At least put up a symbolic fence around your property before you start throwing lawsuits around.

Re:What is unusual in this case is...

[gbulmash]

Detect where the user is coming from and display the content or don't. The technology is mature, simple, and highly porous. Now, if the other site takes the extra step of hacking through your protection layer by lying about the referrer, then take them to court immediately.

The site doesn't set the referrer string. The browser does. Detecting where the visitor is coming from depends on the visotor's browser to tell you. Usually the browser will, but a firewall or proxy server might strip that out. So then you have entirely legitimate users who are being denied the content because they are not coming from the correct place.

Wow.

[paganizer]

Wow. They made the entire Internet illegal.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

Wow. They made the entire Internet illegal.

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.

[n00854180t]

Yes, but you miss the larger impact of the ruling, which essentially defines every link on the internet as illegal, so long as the owner of the target site cares to say "boo". And if you take it one step further, any site linking to any site that contains copyrighted material would also be illegal, covering all the rest of the content on the internet, that may or may not directly host copyrighted content or have bothered to copyright their site design.

Re:Wow.

[Aadain2001]

I think the key concept you are missing is the linking directly to copyrighted material that the owner does not want others to link to. A copyright holder can decide who and how their material is distributed (as it should be). What is this rules does is reverse the rule of thumb of "if you put it on the internet, you are publishing it for anyone to see, unless you protect access to it". Now, instead of having to protect the content through technical measures, they can use lawyers instead. All-n-all, I don't think this will change much. Unless a copyright holder wants to take everyone who links to their content to court, they are still bitter off using technical means of protected their content from being used as was in this case.

Re:Wow.

[Dr. Zowie]

No, actually, they pretty much broke the internet. There are well-established ways of preventing linking from outside pages (using cookies, checking referrer: tags, etc.).

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.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

Yes, but you miss the larger impact of the ruling, which essentially defines every link on the internet as illegal, so long as the owner of the target site cares to say "boo".

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.

Re:Wow.

[m0rph3us0]

That is like having a big billboard in front of your store and free stuff in the back, and suing someone because they are telling people that you can bypass the billboard and go straight to the back.

Re:Wow.

[n00854180t]

You miss the point that it isn't the government's job to secure profits for any business or individual. If the owner of the content didn't want it seen by the public, they should have made it available only to private users, and not via a public URL. This situation is 100% analogous to a painter displaying, in full public view, a prized painting, then demanding $10 to view it, and crying to the government when no one pays your $10 fee to look at the painting. If the artist wanted the painting to be inaccessable, it is HIS JOB, not the government's, to make sure it is not publicly accessible.

Re:Wow.

[n00854180t]

Depriving someone of their ability to feed, clothe, and/or shelter themselves is a very small step from imprisonment. So the judge might as well have made it illegal.

Re:Wow.

[Aadain2001]

The internet is a bit more complicated than that. To extend your painter analogy, imagine you have to be within sight of some sponsored advertisements at the public space the painting is displayed. Much like NASA car, you just cannot see the main attraction without also catching glimpses of the ads. Now, imagine someone walked up, took a super-high resolution photo of the painting. He could then display the painting around the corner, with his own advertisements, thus profiting off the painters copyrighted work. This would be a better analogy to the case. The painter is only asking the government to protect his copyright, which he has the right to do. If he choose to display the picture without any ads and did it out of the kindness of his heart, he could still prevent the second person from copying his painting in the public space and making money from it. That is what a copyright is.

Re:Wow.

[mrchaotica]

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

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!

And as usual, it's up to the copyright holder to tell someone to knock it off.

No, what's usual -- and appropriate -- would be for the copyright holder to take down content he doesn't want other people to see, not whine to the court (using up public resources) to cover for his own stupidity!

Re:Wow.

[Rogerborg]

You say "No" as though both can't be true.

Re:Wow.

[Kpau]

A poor defense coupled with an idiot judge who doesn't do his own homework and a moron plaintiff who can't manage their website .... Talk about rolling "1" on a 1d20 3 times in a row... Internet broken, film at 11 - o wait, never mind we can't link to that now....

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

No, what's usual -- and appropriate -- would be for the copyright holder to take down content he doesn't want other people to see, not whine to the court (using up public resources) to cover for his own stupidity!

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.

[that this is not und]

Much like NASA car, you just cannot see the main attraction without also catching glimpses of the ads.

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.

[russ1337]

>>> I think the key concept you are missing is the linking directly to copyrighted material that the owner does not want others to link to.

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.

[profplump]

Except if you took a high resoluiton picture you'd actually have a copy, distinct from the original. A better analogy might be an artist puts their painting in a gallery window, and you open a shop across the street and put in a telescope so people can see the orignal painting, People still have to go *somewhere* to see the painting, and you *haven't* made an unauthorized copy, you just removed the original context (the gallery window) and replaced it with your own shop.

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?

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

That is like having a big billboard in front of your store and free stuff in the back, and suing someone because they are telling people that you can bypass the billboard and go straight to the back.

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 you want, and whether it would work - the other guy's an ass (partly for doing it in the first place, but mostly for not stopping when simply asked to).

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

Depriving someone of their ability to feed, clothe, and/or shelter themselves is a very small step from imprisonment.

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.

[afidel]

The thing that makes this and all deep linking cases STUPID is that there is a simple technology solution, simply redirect traffic from referer's other than your own site to your main page! It's a 3 minute httpd.conf rule if you've ever written an Apache rule, otherwise it might take you an hour or two. The other possibility is to lock up your content behind a membership frontend, either pay-for or simple signup. If you don't use these type of methods of limiting access and you have a publicly available website then anyone is within their rights to link to you however they choose.

Re:Wow.

[bunions]

> No, actually, they pretty much broke the internet.

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.

Re:Wow.

[pclminion]

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 embed the spacetime of a local Walmart inside my own store. When a customer walks into my store, they see Walmart and cheerfully do their shopping there. But in order to get in/out of Walmart, they have to go through MY STORE. This gives me the opportunity to sell things to them. And my store will have WAY more customers coming through (because of the Walmart) than it would have had otherwise. Basically, I am capitalizing on the success of Walmart because I am able to "embed" a Walmart into my own store.

Linking external content deceptively into a frame on your own website is pretty much the same thing. People are lead to that site by the content (which isn't mine), and even though their primary interest is in the other person's content, they are still AT MY SITE and I can still benefit financially from that.

Having said all this, I do not like this judge's ruling.

Re:Wow.

[networkBoy]

I was going to say used a mirror to show the painting around the corner rather than the photo, but you're idea is even better.
-nB

Re:Wow.

[dircha]

"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."

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 arm waving.

This scenario translates rather well into a real world analogy.

A distant motocross goods store has setup an offer in which, in order to promote motocross, if you write the store with a request for a video of particular motocross events, they will send you the video free of charge. Now, as a motocross enthusiast, I have requested and seen many of their videos myself. I decide to compile a list of my favorite videos. I then publish that list, including the video title and video identifier number, so that readers of my list can write to the motocross goods store and request free copies of the videos for themselves.

In the real world, the motocross goods store might eventually determine that it is not sustainable to honor all requests for free motocross videos, and would either discontinue free distribution or perform additional research to develop a more targeted distribution scheme.

The store would have no basis for attempting to prevent me from distributing my list of favorite, free, mail order motocross videos.

They would be laughed out of court. The judge would tell them, "If you can not afford to honor public requests for free, mail order motocross videos, THEN STOP SENDING THE VIDEOS OUT TO ANYONE WHO ASKS FOR THEM."

Maybe we should just shut down the whole damn series of tubes before idiots like these guys really hurt someone.

Re:Wow.

[n00854180t]

It is still the domain of the content owner, not the governments, to ensure that access to content is restricted to authorized users (i.e., those that view your ad). Otherwise, you get into precisely the situation this has caused, i.e., the government takes the role of securing the profit of the content provider. If the content provider wants every one of its users to view an ad, it is their responsibility, not the government's, that third parties are not able to view their (PUBLIC! so it cannot be "theft" as some others here are saying) content without seeing ads.

Re:Wow.

[WilliamSChips]

I think you mean: "So Time Magazine should stop putting its magazines on the shelf because otherwise they can't stop you from linking to a Wikipedia article about that issue which has the cover on it."

Re:Wow.

[croddy]

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...

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.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> No, what's usual -- and appropriate -- would be for the copyright holder to take down content he doesn't want other people to see,
>> not whine to the court (using up public resources) to cover for his own stupidity!

> 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?

This is more like Time Magazine suing a newsstand owner to keep him from letting people browse the magazine before buying it.

Re:Wow.

[Dunbal]

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?

      Actually I think TIME would be pretty happy if you did that. Free publicity, see? Now, if you play around with photoshop a bit, change the title to LIME, claim it is your own, and offer to sell it, then I can imagine they would be pretty pissed off.

Re:Wow.

[croddy]

A copyright holder can decide who and how their material is distributed (as it should be). What is this rules does is reverse the rule of thumb of "if you put it on the internet, you are publishing it for anyone to see, unless you protect access to it". Now, instead of having to protect the content through technical measures, they can use lawyers instead.

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.

[swissfondue]

In Chicago, it seems that it is forbidden to take pictures of a sculpture in a public park as you would be infringing the intellectual property rights of the artist: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0330/p15s01-usju.htm l

Re:Wow.

[n00854180t]

Your analogy is incorrect. By the logic of the judge, anyone giving the location of Time Magazine (a copyrighted piece of content) to another person (without first listing the content of every ad in Time Magazine, in every issue ever published) would be required to pay Time Magazine for profit deprivation.

Re:Wow.

[Loconut1389]

except that the website guy -can- stop people without any help from anyone else (except maybe an IT guy) and without affecting his own viewers, let alone his bottom line.

Re:Wow.

[Keith Handy]

Those who can't technical, legal.

Yes, I verbed two adjectives in that sentence. Lawsuit me. ;)

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

But this "leech" isn't copying anything. How can it be copyright infringement if you aren't actually copying the content in question?

It's a link. It's a reference to where the material is. It would be trivial to reject requests coming via a link on the leech's site, but making the linking itself illegal, if the copyright holder says it is, is stupid.

Yeah, what the leech is doing is unethical. But this is a stupid way to resolve the problem.

Re:Wow.

[Matilda the Hun]

You're missing one major point. This isn't a link to the other site. This is a link to material on the other person's site. Sounds mild, but I believe the more heard-of term is hotlinking. It's saying is illegal. Which makes sense. What the other side had a problem with is the fact that people were viewing their material, at the cost of their bandwidth, without their ads on their site being viewed. Before, it was just a really asshole thing to do. Now it seems to be plain illegal.

Re:Wow.

[Maserati]

No, this isn't what the Internet was designed to do, which is provide links to other information sources. It's still a little vague in The FA - which is still clearer than the summary - but what the case is here is that the defendant was effectively embedding the streams into his own page, complete with his own advertising. That's a no-no. What would be perfectly legitimate would have been a link to the plaintiff's page with the video streams. That's the appropriate thing to do. Notice that embedded YouTube or Google Video content (among many others) is both branded and provides a link to the video's page at the hosting site; they're set up that way because they explicitly allow embedding. In this case the content was just plain hijacked (to misapply another concept to copyright law). The plaintiff had contacted the defendant prior to bringing suit.

Embedding others' content = bad
Linking to others' content = good

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hint: there's a reason why it's called "COPYright". Your "example" involves making a copy. This doesn't. It was a hyperlink to the original copy.

Re:Wow.

[Chandon Seldon]

This still isn't a legal issue. It's not hard to set up a referrer check that ships along some shit porn or something to viewers from the unwanted website.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean he can print "instructions" on how to get the data by posting the URL without hyperlinking to it?

Re:Wow.

[a.d.trick]

Then you just block access from the people looking through the telescope. Web browsers have these things called referers. Say I'm viewing a webpage at http://foo.org/some/page and it includes an image from another webserver (baz.org). When my browser goes to get that image it tells baz.org "Hey I'm coming from http://foo.org/some/page and I've come to get this image". It's perfectly fine for baz.org to reply with a 403 (in laymans terms: "No, go away") if the referer is from another website.

I agree that this can be anoying, but there's already a technological way to fix the problem. Going to the courts over this is somewhat retarted.

Re:Wow.

[DrSkwid]

Referrer headers are untrustworthy and should not be relied on for access restriction, or much else for that matter.

Some places strip them from outgoing requests at the packet filter / firewall

Re:Wow.

[DrSkwid]

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=213268&cid =17344376

Re:Wow.

[DrSkwid]

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=213268&cid =17344376

Re:Wow.

[DrSkwid]

That's best analogy anyone came up for, for this issue.

Re:Wow.

[DamnStupidElf]

Except if you took a high resoluiton picture you'd actually have a copy, distinct from the original. A better analogy might be an artist puts their painting in a gallery window, and you open a shop across the street and put in a telescope so people can see the orignal painting, People still have to go *somewhere* to see the painting, and you *haven't* made an unauthorized copy, you just removed the original context (the gallery window) and replaced it with your own shop.

Yeah, but what if you stick a prism behind the telescope and let two people see it at once? What if you split the image from the telescope a hundred thousand ways and send the resulting photons to other galleries around the country? Sure, you might have to shine a really bright light on the picture or amplify the light stream to make it show up with any intensity at the galleries, but have you made any copies?

Re:Wow.

[profplump]

Curtains are also untrustworthy and should not be relied on for access restriction. A sufficiently bright light, or one of the proper wavelength, can penetrate them without significant hindrance.

But more to the point, their complaint is not that people accessed the site, just that they didn't do so in a way that generated ad revenue. If someone is technically inclined enough to strip or otherwise modify their headers to gain access they are certainly technically inclined enough to install AdBlock if they wanted to avoid ads.

Re:Wow.

[anagama]

I hereby present you with the "Analogy of the Year Award". Embedded Walmart -- that's awesome.

Re:Wow.

[profplump]

Not unless you consider mirrors to be copying devices. More than one person at a time can observe the original due to the divergent paths of reflected photons. I don't see how optical splitting would be any different.

Re:Wow.

[daeg]

There is a major difference, though. Displaying something in a window has no inherent costs -- once it's there, it's free to hang there. Bandwidth, on the other hand, is not free.

I am wary to applaud this ruling, but at least it will give some recourse to those that have been targeted by bandwidth thefts. Instead of just being able to fuck with thieves (by replacing my_super_highres_image.jpg with, say, some kind some kind of bathtub graphic), companies now have a legal ruling to back them.

Re:Wow.

[John Nowak]

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?

You're not getting it. Linking to a site is like pointing someone to a copy of Time Magazine, not committing copyright infringement.

Re:Wow.

[Reaperducer]

Actually I think TIME would be pretty happy if you did that. Free publicity, see?

Go ahead. Try it. See you in court!

Re:Wow.

[DamnStupidElf]

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.

Need I remind you that HTTP is a stateless protocol? If I connect to your server and request a document and you send it, that's your problem. If I needed permission to request documents from your server then I couldn't really fetch index.html in the first place, now could I? Don't forget that in the days of FTP, *everything* was a deep link if it was linked at all, but the FTP server itself presented the terms of use whenever a user connected. HTTP doesn't present the client with any terms of service, so none apply. If you want to provide "protected" content on your server, make sure it checks that the client is authorized to have it before sending it.

Re:Wow.

[Maserati]

I agree, I just didn't address that point. Looking at the situation, I think there may be some issues with referrer checks on the streams, if they're actually using their sponsor's network the setup may be fairly complex. There could also be issues with the streaming server itself that keeps them from applying any restrictions to connection attempts. Not that it couldn't be made to happen if they realized they could just do that to resolve the problem.

I'd be inclined to just return a bit of JavaScript that loads my own page (and ads) in place of the linker's. Some PHB will probably just put ads in the stream, and we certainly don't want that. The clueless have been getting this wrong for years.

Re:Wow.

[Reaperducer]

It is trivial to defeat referrers. Especially if you're determined, as this peson proved he is.

Re:Wow.

[bunions]

I don't see what that has to do with anything. Someone asked someone else to stop linking directly to his content, which cost him money. Instead of acting like a decent human, he continued to do so. Now his lack of common courtesy has been penalized by the law. The system works.

Re:Wow.

[Chandon Seldon]

If you use the actual tactic that I suggested, rather than assuming that I'm dumb and think that the referrer header is something it isn't, this isn't a problem.

Again: If you detect that the HTTP request is coming as the result of being embedded in a specific, known, site that you don't want embedding your content and ship something wildly offensive and vomit inducing instead, the problem will go away.

Re:Wow.

[Chandon Seldon]

I'm well aware that referrers aren't a reliable source of information to make security decisions. That's not what I was suggesting. I was suggesting that the referrer header usually *does* contain valid information about what page is embedding content - and can be used to server alternate offensive content to specific unwanted embedders. If the offensive content isn't enough to discourage them from embedding your content, you can then resort to other techniques to block it technologically - but the "Goatse Guy / THIS WEBSITE STEALS BANDWIDTH" image replacement technique almost always works.

Re:Wow.

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

To which point, the company should have been checking the HTTP referer to screen out such "deep" linking. It is the websites fault that people are jacking their content, they were allowing it.

Re:Wow.

[Dunbal]

See you in court!

      I wonder how they prevent people from seeing the cover in bookstores and supermarkets then. Hmm.

Re:Wow.

[DamnStupidElf]

I don't see what that has to do with anything. Someone asked someone else to stop linking directly to his content, which cost him money. Instead of acting like a decent human, he continued to do so. Now his lack of common courtesy has been penalized by the law. The system works.

That's like asking someone else not to give out the punchline to your jokes. It may be impolite, but there shouldn't be anything illegal about it, nor should it be cause for civil action. The relevant fact is that the HTTP server is honoring requests and serving up data. If you *don't* want deep linking to occur, just set a cookie on the main page that is required to download the content. It's incredibly simple to prevent most deep linking, or even better just set up bittorrent for large popular downloads.

Re:Wow.

[Dr. Zowie]

No, the links weren't costing him money, handing out the data to anyone who asked was costing him money.

You might as well stand outside a football stadium handing out hotdogs to anyone who asks, and then complain when some people who aren't going to the game eat your hotdogs.

If you're handing them out to anyone who asks nicely, then you don't really have a reason to complain when someone you don't like gets one. Even if somone down the street is shouting out "Hey -- ask that guy for a hotdog! He'll give you one!".

The answer is to refrain from feeding the people you don't want to.

Re:Wow.

[Dr. Zowie]

[... embeded-walmart description deleted] Basically, I am capitalizing on the success of Walmart because I am able to "embed" a Walmart into my own store.

Well, actually, (A) the protocol was designed with that sort of thing in mind -- specifically, including other peoples' scientific illustrations in your own web page (hence the stateless IMG tag) -- and (B) Walmart has an easy way of preventing you from doing that. That easy way is called the "referrer" tag: when you ask for a piece of data, your browser TELLS WALMART WHO SENT YOU, thereby making it extremely easy for them to decide whether they want to serve you the data.

Re:Wow.

[Dr. Zowie]

Sure. But then door latches aren't trustworthy either. That doesn't stop people from closing doors.

More importantly, it's pretty simple to include a cryptographic cookie authenticating the session. Most places that care, do.

Re:Wow.

[mysidia]

Now, imagine someone walked up, took a super-high resolution photo of the painting. He could then display the painting around the corner, with his own advertisements, thus profiting off the painters copyrighted work. This would be a better analogy to the case.

Not at all, the reason it is a bad analogy, is pasting a link is not equivalent to taking a high-resolution photograph. Taking the high-resolution photograph would be illegal, since by displaying the photo, you would be creating a performance of the copyrighted work, without permission to have made the high-resolution copy.

A better analogy would be to see the content, you first have to go to a public storefront, where you see the advertising. After you see the advertising, you're escorted to a cab, where you are picked up driven to a second public storefront whose location isn't published, and from the new location, you see the content.

Since the second storefront doesn't have advertising, if you knew of its location, you could get the content for free. What a deep linker does is publishes the street address of the secret venue, and perhaps the code word to get in, so that anyone can go there, skipping the public storefront.

The trouble is due to how the web works, and how they implement the advertising, the advertising and the stream are separable. Even if you never deep linked, someone could in theory patch their browser to suppress the advertising.

An obvious fix is to deny access to the content, until it has been detected that the advertising was downloaded and shown. Another possibility would be to include the advertising content inside part of the video stream itself, then there would be no way to separate them (and the people who deep link would be happy, since they could continue to have convenient, direct access to the stream, without a bulky web browser in the way).

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the government's job if 51%+ of the population tell the gov it is. Or: If the Gov thinks it is it's job and 51%+ of the population does not tell the gov that it is not. ;)

Re:Wow.

[mysidia]

Yeah, but what if you stick a prism behind the telescope and let two people see it at once? What if you split the image from the telescope a hundred thousand ways and send the resulting photons to other galleries around the country? Sure, you might have to shine a really bright light on the picture or amplify the light stream to make it show up with any intensity at the galleries, but have you made any copies?

No, you have not. The reason you have not made a copy is the second the storefront moves their painting an inch, or closes a window, obstructing the path of light to your telescope, none of those thousands of galleries around the country can see the painting any more.

If it were a copy, the other galleries could continue to see it, even if someone burned the original.

Splitting light so many times and sending it so far is also sure to introduce so much noise into the image, that the remote galleries aren't going to see it, with crystal clarity, also. What you describe is not very plausible, and besides, it would likely be orders of magnitude less expensive for the other galleries to properly acquire the rights to copy and show the painting, even if that option were available.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

I wonder how they prevent people from seeing the cover in bookstores and supermarkets then. Hmm.

It doesn't matter! That's their choice and part of their sales process. Representing some subset of their content as your own isn't even part of the same topic.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

Your analogy is incorrect. By the logic of the judge, anyone giving the location of Time Magazine (a copyrighted piece of content) to another person (without first listing the content of every ad in Time Magazine, in every issue ever published) would be required to pay Time Magazine for profit deprivation.

You'd be right if that's what we were talking about, but we're not. Having your own web site, and making it appear to have more content by linking to files that some else is hosting (and which someone else created!) as if those were pieces of your site, or resources that you have the right to bring to your audience in the context of your site (running your revenue-generating ads!) is what's really at hand, here.

Re:Wow.

[Planesdragon]

I think the key concept you are missing is the linking directly to copyrighted material that the owner does not want others to link to.

Yes, exactly. Now stop there.

When you render a site as text/html or its equivalents, it gets rendered in a browser with various other linked files. It is an *integral* part of a web browser to create "bookmarks" to such pages. This is fundamental to how the web is designed. By serving a text/html or equivalent page, you're in essense granting permission for whomever seeks that page to link to it and distribute said link to others.

The fundamental difference is when you like to non-text/html data, such as videos, music files, and images. On the internet, these files should always as a matter of course be linked to from another page, and this is where the line is drawn. The article isn't about not being able to link to someone's article off their main page; the holding is that you can't leech, and if you do you can expect the law to agree with the other guy.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

You're not getting it. Linking to a site is like pointing someone to a copy of Time Magazine, not committing copyright infringement.

But presenting someone else's video files (as is the case here) from within the context of your own web site, as method of enriching the apparent content of your site (to increase traffic, improve your image, and raise more ad revenue) absolutely is. A typical visitor to such a site can't tell the difference between a video that the site has created and is hosting itself, vs. one that he's slipped into the presentation of his site while leeching from somewhere else. A reasonable person can certainly conclude that the leeching site is simply trying to sponge off of someone else's material, and when he didn't stop when asked, the situation escalated. There's more to this than a link that says "hey, go over to site X and check out this cool video he has there - he'll appreciate the traffic!" No, he's saying welcome to my site, and watch this cool video. Can't you see the difference?

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

Sorry, that scenario doesn't pan out. If one of the people who has requested the free videos is in turn running, say, a local cable-access show... and weaves some of your material into their broadcast, then we're closer to the mark. Or someone runs a web site, and is looking for more traffic, and links directly to someone else's material while conveying the impression that the site being visited is the one that's rich with motocross videos - that's not only more like it, it's exactly like it.

Someone who is trying to create the illusion of a content-rich site by hot linking to copywritten files that will play browser-side without any contextual sense that the file is being presented by someone that doesn't have rights to represent it as their own ... well, they deserve a smacking.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

Basically, this judge has given webmasters grounds to sue people in lieu of learning how to do their damned jobs properly.

That's like saying people don't have an expectation of privacy in their homes if they don't plan ahead and install shielding that will prevent someone with a million-dollar thermal imaging system from watching them from a van on the street. It doesn't matter how precise that analogy is or not - you're preaching an arms race, rather than a rational civil ethic.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

>> You're not getting it. Linking to a site is like pointing someone to a copy of Time Magazine, not committing copyright infringement.

> But presenting someone else's video files (as is the case here) from within the context of your own web site, as method of enriching
> the apparent content of your site (to increase traffic, improve your image, and raise more ad revenue) absolutely is.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

When you publish something on a Web server, you are giving people permission to access it. Whether you secure it and require payment to view it is up to you, but don't confuse the access restrictions with copyright issues.

Any time people download a file, they make a copy. That can't be avoided, and by serving the file you are implicitly authorizing that copy. You can decide how you want to serve it, but that has nothing to do with the legality of the copying or your ownership of the copyright. Only YOU have control over who can access the file.

In fact it is the BROWSER that accesses the file (not the referring site) and makes the copy - a copy 100% authorized by the publisher. So whatever your opinion on deep-linking (you can argue the ethics of it until you're blue in the face), it is NOT copyright infringement. No unauthorized copies are being made, period.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

When you publish something on a Web server, you are giving people permission to access it. Whether you secure it and require payment to view it is up to you, but don't confuse the access restrictions with copyright issues

When someone else embeds your streamed material within their own website, contextually characterizing it as their own stuff and generating ad revenue while doing so, it isn't a matter of "access." It's a matter of someone else earning money off of the illusion of distributing material to which they don't have copyright, and - to pour salt in the wound - burning up your bandwidth to do it. It makes no difference that a web browser is the tool that's used, indirectly. The person running the web site that's attempting to pretend it's their material is infringing in every sense that matters. You say no copies are being made, but that makes no difference. It's exactly the same as re-broadcasting copywritten material and pretending it's yours to broadcast.

Re:Wow.

[siegesama]

First off, yes, that is how the internet (or web, specficially) was designed to work. A hypertext document referring to additional content as separate resources. They didn't magically work around anything to have this happen, they linked to a publicly accessible resource. The article explicitly states that the material was linked-to, and not copied or redistributed.

You seem to be saying that since you disagree with how they used the content on a moral basis, that it should be illegal for them to do so; the "I don't like it, so it should be illegal" line of thought. This is dangerous, and I hope that in retrospect you'll realize why.

What actually would have been appropriate would have been for the objecting party to take the technical steps necessary to prohibit the undesired embedding (requiring a session for example, or checking HTTP referrer, or any number of other methods readily available to them). Instead they continued to make the information available openly, and pushed the burden and responsibility of securing their content onto the courts.

I do not believe that the person who was performing the deep linking should probably have been doing it from a moral standpoint, and should instead have linked to the content owner's pages. I also do not believe that, like an idiot, the defendant should have chosen to represent themselves in the matter. But both parties have behaved irresponsibly in this.

Please don't let the law be used as a crutch for the lazy, opting to have a governing voice dictate simple matters from on high. This could have been resolved between the parties either amicably (which it seems was attempted at least), or via a number of fairly trivial technical means (which the article indicates did not occur).

Re:Wow.

[Propaganda13]

This and the maze analogy are pretty good.

At first glance, being able to limit deep linking looks ok, but it does have major consequences.

1. How will this affect search engines? Google could have found the content. Robert Davis could change his site to be a search engine for specific content, and would that make it legal then?

2. What steps should the content owner have to take to make aware that content should not be deep linked? (Remember the internet is international) Would it be something that the W3C or another organization would put out as a "standard"? Countries could make their own laws then with this "standard" in mind. Something along the line of robots.txt or a META element would show the content owners intentions, but would not be apparent to a person copying a url. Would the content owner have to put everything in a DONOTLINK folder?

I do think the content owner should have to do the equivalent of posting a "Do Not Enter" sign, but not be required to put locks on the doors.

Re:Wow.

[Bob MacSlack]

well, they deserve a smacking.

Absolutely, but the courts are not the proper way. What the guy was doing is asinine, but should absolutely not be illegal. If you've decided to provide access to your content to anyone who requests it (which is exactly what most webservers do) you cannot complain to the courts when someone makes use of it to their own gain. One of the other analogies used for this has been setting up a store with the sole purpose of viewing a painting in the store window across the street, but surrounded with your own advertising. Stupid? Yes. Illegal? No, and shouldn't be. Even if you set it up so somehow it appears the painting is actually in your store, it's still being displayed by the actual owner.

You can't complain when someone gives tours of your publicly viewable content in such a way that people don't see your advertising. It is your responsibility to ensure that people can only see it in the manner you wish. Don't go crying to the courts if you can't figure out how to do that.

Re:Wow.

[croddy]

A web server that's handing out 200 OK to anyone who requests a file is not like a house without an ablative thermal shield. It's more like a house that automatically unlocks itself for whoever knocks.

If you only want to show your restricted content to people who have viewed your ads, you have lots of options:

• set a cookie when you serve your ads and check for it when you serve the restricted content
• require an HTTP referer from your own domain
• require authentication

None of these is the beginning of a technological "arms race". These measures are no more absurd than asking people who they are before you let them into your house.

Being too lazy to set your web site up to reflect your wishes isn't really a persuasive position. Don't want some people to see your restricted content? Duh, don't transmit it to them.

Re:Wow.

[FLEB]

Still, it would make it somewhere between spotty and completely ineffective to deep-link to a site that did referer filtering.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

Don't want some people to see your restricted content?

That's not the point. The case in question involves someone else portraying your material as his and making money off of that... and using up your bandwidth while he's at it. Surely you see the difference.

Re:Wow.

[FLEB]

The thing that I found funny about that is that if you're taking a picture of it from an angle where there is no perimeter visible, most of the light and detail is actually reflected from around it, as a byproduct, not the content, of the sculpture. Of all the sculptures to try to protect with this rationale...

Re:Wow.

[FLEB]

It's still not worth the cost. Server and webspace configuration is all about controlling what you are willing to give to whom. A person's inability to deal gracefully with a spike in demand should not mean that the rest of the world has to tiptoe around one of the cornerstones of the Internet.

I won't say that things shouldn't be made easier, or that people shouldn't be welcomed into the fold, but between things like this and the court cases from people who can't turn on their WiFi security, I'm starting to get annoyed with the entangling legal decisions to shield people from knowing and doing what should be basic technical procedures, defenses, and solutions. Unfortunately, the quick buck to be made by "simple black box" equipment and service vendors from signing on anyone with a gasping pulse leads to obscuring even the basic technical concepts behind widely-used technology, and the ignorant whine and run to the courts when they find that the way they think things should work isn't the way things have ever worked.

Re:Wow.

[bhsx]

and here i had mod points a couple days ago....
of all the hair-brained analogies I've read, I have to say, yours comes closest!
I'd even push it a little further, in this case...(extraneous use of ellipses i might add)

Imagine instead of them checking-out at the walmart store, you had your own shopping cart that
grabbed all their orders. Then (and yes, i realize the ridiculousness of this) Walmart sends
out the order and you manage to get paid for it.

I hate the ruling, if you look at it skin-deep; but this is not as cut-and-dry as many here
(unsurprisingly) are making it out to be.

Re:Wow.

[Maserati]

Yes, the best case scenario is to just make it impossible to embed content like this. I was speculating that there may in fact be a technical scenario where they really can't block connections based on the referrer. I certainly believe that if their chosen platform, whatever the constraints, was incapable of controlling access in any way then the site admins did make a fundamental error.

I thought I had made it clear, embedding someone's content is bad. The defendant got the ad revenue for all the viewers through his site. That's not right. The people paying for the bandwidth deserve the revenue, it's very simple. Just because they made a mistake doesn't make it right to profit from the bandwidth they paid for. Burglary is still illegal if the door wasn't pushed completely shut.

Re:Wow.

[Maxo-Texas]

I think you miss the point that all content is copyrighted.

The requirement that they object is a red herring.

You are not allowed to use anyone else's copyrighted material without securing their EXPLICIT consent. You see this kind of stuff on wiki all the time as they are very careful about copyright.

Again- for the second time in as many days- GOOGLE isn't legal under these rulings. It produces links to copyrighted material.

The internet grew so quickly because we were allowed to play fast and loose with the rules and had a lot of freedom. As they lock everything down, it is going to solidify into concrete and only the illegal/secret parts of it are going to keep growing fast.

Re:Wow.

[Maxo-Texas]

Perhaps the embedded Walmart analogy will replace the car analogy for the next century!

Re:Wow.

[DavidTC]

No, you aren't allowed to copy someone's copyrighted content without their permission. You're allowed to use it however the fuck you want if you were given a legal copy.

Of course, neither of that applies, because writing the location down that someone can go and ask the copyright owner for a copy is neither 'using' nor 'copying' anything. There are free local newspapers in dispensers around town, if I say 'Go to this address, take an paper from the holder, turn to page 89', I haven't copied or even used a damn thing. It would be pure nonsense for the newspaper to sue me because, by giving a page number, I was denying them ad revenue as readers flipped through the magazine.

Re:Wow.

[DavidTC]

Doing something that's 'exactly like' something that's against the law, but not actually against the law is not, in fact, illegal. I myself participated in, or at least a knowing accomplice to, bank fraud, theft, solicitation, and extortion, and it wasn't illegal because it was, in fact, a stage performance of 'It's a Wonderful Life'.

Notice the law used in this 'case', and I use the term loosely because the defendant was a moron, was the DMCA, with the claim that a deep link was circumventing an access control device, not any sort of copying claim. The DMCA may be part of copyright law, but it wasn't a 'copyright violation', it was a violation of the same law making DeCSS illegal, which is orthogonal to any actual copying.

As there wasn't as access control device at all, I think everyone needs to realize this ruling was utterly bogus and will quite successfully be challenged by any morerately intelligent lawyer. The law is rather lax about what an 'access control device' is, but if someone walks up to a device and says 'gimme', without forging any sort of information, and the device says 'sure', I think we can conclude it is not, in fact, controlling access.

Now, if the linking site had recommended installing a proxy that forges Referers to get around the linked site's referering blocking, sure. Or had managed to embed an microscopic iframe of the home page earlier as the user surfed, thus gaining them a cookie they would need later for the direct link. I don't agree with the DMCA in general, but I can see how those could be violations of the 'access control' portions of it.

But the linked site made absolutely no technological attempt to control access, and thus the DMCA is completely and utterly inapplicable.

Re:Wow.

[DavidTC]

I'd be inclined to just return a bit of JavaScript that loads my own page (and ads) in place of the linker's.

I think this solution is a lot funnier than referer blocking.

Or, even better, bounce them to a completely unrelated page on the linker's website, so it looks like his navigation is completely flummuxed.

Re:Wow.

[DavidTC]

It is trivial to defeat referrers. Especially if you're determined, as this peson proved he is.

It is trivial for surfers to defeat referers. (Note the correct incorrect spelling.) There are lots of anonymizing proxies that will serve http://example.com/ as the referer for any item on example.com, thus passing almost all referer checks. (1)

However, it's completely impossible for another web site to defeat referer checks, without getting all their end users to download said proxies and install them.

Referers are stupid to use for security. Anything the web browser hands you is stupid to use for security. However, they are fine to use to stop people at other web sites from leeching your site's content. (And by 'content', I mostly mean images and stuff. Web site operates who block deep linking to web pages are, well, fairly dumb and not quite following how the internet works. But they can if they want to, although even there a better solution is to use cookies and session ids.)

1) Of course, you can break the proxies in all circumstances, even when they are legitimately on your site, by putting all your web pages on example.com, with no referer checks, and images and everything else on, say, images.example.com, with a referer block of everything but example.com. The proxy will always use images.example.com when getting stuff from the image server, and hence it will never work. If people with referer blocking start annoying you, go ahead.

As an added bonus, it's probably easier to set up than actually trying to figure out how to tell the web server which content you want people to be able to link to and which you don't. PDFs? flash? With my method, you just stick them on different virtual server. The only rule is that nothing on the image server can link to or include anything else on the image server.

Re:Wow.

[gbulmash]

Still, it would make it somewhere between spotty and completely ineffective to deep-link to a site that did referer filtering.

Yes, but the point you're not getting is that every legitimate visitor to the legitimate website would also be subject to the referrer checking. Any of them who had their referrer headers stripped or otherwise altered by a firewall, proxy server, etc. would also be denied access to the content.

That's why filtering based on referrers is inadvisable, not because it is only partial protection against leeching, but because it can shut out legitimate users.

Another method would be to create an alias you link to, like mystreamingvideo.wmv. Only you've got an .htaccess file in that directory that treats .wmv files as PHP, and the actual content of mystreamingvideo.wmv is a PHP script that checks for some authentication token like an encrypted cookie, a session header, etc. If that authentication token is there, it proxies out the desired video. If the token isn't, then it proxies out a video containing an explanation of why the video isn't being received.

That increases your overhead, but can be fairly effective because you don't even need a persistent token, just one that can be embedded in the browser and accessed while the viewer is on the page where the content is embedded.

As for the rest of you lot... They shouldn't have to take their content offline to prevent leeching. And while there are solutions to help prevent it, they should not be mandatory.

Assume Neighbor A has a swimming pool in his back yard. He has a fence around the yard and another fence around the pool. Both are gated and locked. But Neighbor B's kid climbs over both fences and goes swimming. Only he slips while running around the patio, bonks his head, rolls into the pool and drowns. Neighbor B sues Neighbor A, claiming Neighbor A didn't do enough to keep Neighbor B's kid out of the pool.

Now, if you're the sort who is claiming it's the website's duty to play cat and mouse with leechers, trying to protect their content, and they should have no legal recourse, then you're the sort who sides with Neighbor B. You're the sort that says burglars should be able to sue homeowners if they fall down the stairs while robbing a house.

- Greg If you believe that's the case, then please provide me your address. I'll tap into your power lines and suck down $8 worth of electricity a day. When you complain that I'm costing you $240 a month, I'll say that if you don't like it, you should get your power turned off.

Re:Wow.

[dangitman]

No, the best analogy would be a smaller sports enthusiast's site linking directly to footage of streaming sports events from a large commercial sports site's servers.

Re:Wow.

[DavidTC]

Referers are stupid to use for security. Anything the web browser hands you is stupid to use for security.

Minor addition: They aren't stupid in some circumstances. For example, there are some exploits that include someone directing you to a login page, and gleaning your password from it somehow. It is totally rational to, say, watch what page someone arrives via, and only let them in if they are coming in with a known link, or coming in via a bookmark. (Which has no referer.)

It is idiotic to trust referers, or anything the web browser supplies, when the attack is the surfer. When the attacker is another website, locking down certain pages to only be reachable via other, specific, known pages, or from a bookmark, is a reasonable security addition. There's no reason that someone would be reaching a bank's login screen from a random URL, and they damn certainly shouldn't be reaching the password submission page from it. The number of attacks this fights is tiny, but it completely shuts the whole class of attacks down from the start.

Of course, they have to be careful of people with filters, and should probably allow a referer that is the / of their site to let them in.

Now, there are people out there who will say 'I built a custom start page which is kept on my machine that uses a form with hidden variables and the right submission URL so I can login to my bank with one click, and your suggestion stops it!'. It'd like to apologize to each of you personally: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That should cover everyone.

Re:Wow.

[DavidTC]

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 pointing at YOU who are giving away the stuff you keep in your back yard, because, apparently, you are too fucking stupid to only hand stuff to people who you want to have it.

Re:Wow.

[siegesama]

First, regarding "I thought I made it clear, embedding someone's content is bad," you are not the designator of judgment for all mankind, so do not attempt to take the tone that you are. You do not lead, and as your further statements indicate, you are unfit to do so.

Secondly, the word "embed" is technically incorrect in this case, as the content from the media is never embedded, mixed, or reused. Nor is it duplicated or redistributed. It is linked to. That is to say, its original location is publicized. Almost every blog is based on this principle, of finding something and republishing its location, and while some instances of it may seem unscrupulous it does not rate at the level of, say, plagiarism or even real copyright infringement.

Regarding "burglary," If you're going to attempt to apply physical metaphors to logical constructs at least attempt to make a metaphor that matches better to the subject matter. Burglary is so far out of scope that it makes you seem either incompetent or insane. You may also need to one day come to understand that metaphors are meaningless except as the very beginnings of a rudimentary explanation into a given topic. A metaphor can never solidly communicate identical relationships, except in a tautology. Basing moral (or worse, legal) decisions off of a metaphor means that you've applied judgment to a topic you do not understand, and hence your decision will be flawed.

You're also inexcusably naive re: "deserve the revenue," and "Just because they made a mistake." There is no such thing as "deserving revenue," you either take action to earn and receive it, or you do not. Income is not karma. And yes, you can profit from something someone else paid for. There's no selfish exclusivity to causality. Any action that another takes that has side effects can in turn be utilized for another's gain. They made some videos publicly available, so someone else linked to those videos too. Could it have been done more politely? Heck yes. Does that mean that it's a legal matter? Heck no.

You, and many like you, cannot get past the fact that even though a situation is unpalatable, it does not mean that it is (or needs to be) illegal. Not every disagreement is a case to bring before a judge. The legal system is not a giant father figure meant to sweep in and magically whisk troubles away. The content host did not perform diligence to protect his content, and in fact had made it readily available to any machine on the internet that might request it. When this went to court and the defendant made a miserable attempt at defending himself, he created a precedent that any deep linking can be regarded as illegal.

Re:Wow.

[syukton]

A pretty major difference is that a web server is designed to enable and disable access to selected remote clients (it's part of the HTTP specification), while a house isn't necessarily designed to prevent thermal intrusion.

A much more accurate analogy would be a house that has a system that can block thermal imaging at the flip of a switch, but the user deciding not to turn it on and instead deciding to sue anyone who thermally images them.

This isn't an arms race at all, it's a tragic case of technological stupidity being legally acceptable grounds to sue somebody--and win.

Re:Wow.

[n00854180t]

Again, it's the responsibility of the owner of the sites in question to ensure that people they do not want to access their resources are not allowed to. It most certainly is not the place of the courts. By requiring courts to police access of every web site on the (US) internet, the costs of arbitration would far exceed any costs incurred by the individuals whose content has been "unwantedly linked to" (here is where I pause for dramatic sarcastic effect, with perhaps a left raised eyebrow or such, given such an absurd concept) and the cost to taxpayers would be ridiculous. If a content owner does not want public content to be linked to sans his/her ads, it is their SOLE duty to ensure that. Putting the burden of what is essentially a novice website administrator's job to do onto the courts is ridiculous.

Re:Wow.

[Maxo-Texas]

yes it is insane.

Isn't it more like,

"if you go to the back of the building, you can get a free paper from the stacks of extra papers they put out as trash"

And the judge says that's stealing even if they put it out as trash (this has happened in the real world).
And so the judge says you are aiding and abetting them.

This entire area is built on artificial monopolies. It doesn't make sense. It has no moral founding. It's just arbitrary random rules bought by rich people.

Re:Wow.

[jez9999]

by 'providing' material to which he doesn't hold a copyright

Link, ffs?? Why don't they put links to the relevant pages in Slashdot articles? They're talking about some guy's content but not linking to it!!

Re:Wow.

[jez9999]

What's the moral difference between leeching someone's content and using AdBlock to leech most sites' content? Most Slashdotters seem to have no problem with the latter. No, I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I see virtually no difference. The argument in both cases is either, "view what the content creator wanted you to see" or "view what the hell the 'net allows you to". Make your collective minds up.

Re:Wow.

[marcosdumay]

XXII century? I wonder if we'll stil have Walmarts by then.

Re:Wow.

[ScentCone]

What's the moral difference between leeching someone's content and using AdBlock to leech most sites' content? Most Slashdotters seem to have no problem with the latter. No, I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I see virtually no difference. The argument in both cases is either, "view what the content creator wanted you to see" or "view what the hell the 'net allows you to". Make your collective minds up.

That's a great question. Ethically, it's pretty much the same thing, as you suggest. But in practical terms, here, there's a big difference... the leecher (the guy embedding the other guy's videos on his own site) was presenting this material as if it was his own, burning up the other guy's bandwidth, and attempting to make money off of doing so. He was misrepresenting his rights to the material.

Presumably, someone using AdBlock is saying that he's never going to click on an ad, whether it's shown to him or not. Now, a site may prefer simply not to allow visitors that want to put on those blinders, and of course there are technical approaches to that... but we're not, in that case, dealing with a question of someone else hijacking another person's material and pretending it's their own (classic infringement).

Re:Wow.

[FLEB]

Good point. I wasn't thinking about false-positives.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article, I had gathered that they embedded a link to image.

A more precise analogy would be the index at the front of a magazine that tells you where the article is so you don't have to flip through pages of ads to get there. And I'm pretty sure it's legal to post the page number of a magazine article on a website. This would be as close an analogy as you could get. The user could skip right to the article.

The internet doesn't analogize to the physical world, that's why current law has such problems. But periodical publication is closest.

Re:Wow.

[alienmole]

By the XXIInd century, there'll be nothing but Walmart!

Re:Wow.

[edgr]

This is more like a painter putting a painting somewhere in public view, but maybe down a back alley, and then standing on the main street directing people to it (perhaps demanding a fee, or just making you say hello). Then someone else gives out directions to the painting.

Re:Wow.

[ultranova]

Curtains are also untrustworthy and should not be relied on for access restriction. A sufficiently bright light, or one of the proper wavelength, can penetrate them without significant hindrance.

Unless you make them from a flat sheetlike black hole. Or would light with wavelength much larger than the diameter of the event horizon in the largest direction still pass by ?

Or maybe you could paint on the flat black hole itself, using it as your canvas. That way no one would be able to see, much less copy, your painting :).

Re:Wow.

[profplump]

You can't see through the black hole, but it will lens light around it. Unfortunately it pulls in the wrong direction to see things directly behind it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring

But I think you might be able to sell the "record on to a black hole" idea to the RIAA.

Re:Wow.

[ArtStone]

You have figured out part of the problem...

There are several ways to launch a stream using a web browser including:

- A link to an mp3/realpayer/quicktime playlist (.m3u, .pls, .ram, .qtl) to launch a media player based on the http Content-Type or the file type associations known by the browser
- an application definition to embed the media player into a web page
- A non-http link directly to the streaming server - typically mms:// for Microsoft Multimedia Streaming Server

The streaming server being used by SFX Motor sports is using the mms:// service.

An http page with an mms:// HREF link launches the client PC's Windows Media Player (or WMP plugin for Mac users)... WMP sends the content request with its file name (and optional DRM information) - but the request does not have referring URLs - since it is not http!

So if the infringing site directly linked using an mms:// URI, the MMS server has no ability to know what web page the request came from, only the IP address of the requester.

Now if SFX motor sports was clever, they would add sponsorship messages as a prestream message on the streaming server, or use the facilities of Windows Media player and the mms protocol to display the sponsorship logos directly in Windows Media Player, or use the DRM protection - but they are not under any obligation to be that clever.

The mms: protocol is proprietary and subject to changes by Microsoft as it sees fit.. this is a place which has tried to document how it functions:
http://sdp.ppona.com/

mms: is very useful as it does more than audio streaming - it permits streaming of audio and video together with synchnronization, multicast support, automatic bandwidth adjustment, protocol fallover, etc... It's not a big mystery why most commercial streaming has moved to using this product.

Re:Wow.

[ultranova]

You can't see through the black hole, but it will lens light around it. Unfortunately it pulls in the wrong direction to see things directly behind it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_ring

Um, the page you linked to said that the phenomenon occurs when "the source, lens and observer are all aligned", in other words, the thing being observed is directly behind the hole. The diagram on the page further confirms this, as does logic (just think what direction a beam of light that just barely misses the event horizon bends).

Re:Wow.

[profplump]

Yes, light that barely misses the event horizon is bent so that it appears to come from a source much closer (in an angular sense) to the black hole. But not light that would actually be occluded by the black hole -- that light is still blocked. Take another look at the diagram; it shows objects that are angularly distant from the black hole appearing to be much closer, not objects occluded by the black hole being somehow visible from the far side.

Re:Wow.

[ultranova]

Yes, light that barely misses the event horizon is bent so that it appears to come from a source much closer (in an angular sense) to the black hole. But not light that would actually be occluded by the black hole -- that light is still blocked.

As you may know, the bending of light in gravitational field was first observed by checking the positions of stars during a solar eclipse. Stars that were near Sun in the sky had apparently been moved away from it, just as Einstein predicted. And the phenomenon would be much stronger in a stronger gravitational field

Basically, what I'm saying is that a star that would normally be occluded by the event horizon may have its apparent position moved away from the hole so much that it becomes un-occluded. In fact that's what Einstein's ring is: an object behind the black hole that's been moved away from the hole in all directions, making it appear as a doughnut.

Can't explain it any better without resorting to diagrams, sorry. But yes, you can indeed see behind black holes.

Re:Wow.

[pclminion]

Well, actually, (A) the protocol was designed with that sort of thing in mind -- specifically, including other peoples' scientific illustrations in your own web page

The people who invented the web were scientists. People who understand what plagiarism is. I don't think this kind of thing would have been imaginable to them -- commercial use of the web wasn't even a consideration at the time.

Walmart has an easy way of preventing you from doing that. That easy way is called the "referrer" tag: when you ask for a piece of data, your browser TELLS WALMART WHO SENT YOU

I know what a referrer is. I use a Firefox plugin to obscure my referrer strings in my requests. Kind of shoots a hole in that defense method. The reality is, there's no easy way to prevent people from pilfering your content like this. I don't like it. But I also do not like a law making it illegal.

OMG!! A moron judge in TEXAS?!

[Bonker]

I can't believe it! You'd think we Texans did all our legislation and legal maneuvering by the 'Good ol' Boy' system.

Oh, wait....

More nanny state BS

[wiredlogic]

The government isn't kept around to guarantee that businesses will make a profit. If these sites want to protect their ad click throughs then they can use techniques like unique per-user URLs or validating that the Referrer field in the HTTP request came from within their site.

Re:More nanny state BS

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

The government isn't kept around to guarantee that businesses will make a profit.

It isn't?

Re:More nanny state BS

[jlowery]

>> The government isn't kept around to guarantee that businesses will make a profit.
> It isn't?

No, silly. Government exists to facilitate business profit, not guarantee it. That's why we would never let Medicare negotiate drug prices. I mean, how would we encourage research for new drugs to sold in Canada?

No Big Deal: Wait For The Appeal

[logicnazi]

This isn't really a big deal or very surprising. Most judges aren't too familiar with the internet and technology and at the non-appealete level where they are dealing with a big well funded company who is likely suing someone who hasn't put much money into the legal defense it isn't surprising that one would get bad deciscions like this in unsettled areas of the law.

What really matters is what happens when these issues reach the appealete (damn lack of spellcheck on IE) courts. By that point hopefully the EFF and other organizations have gotten involved to put up a real legal fight and the judges have more time to learn about the technology and issues.

Re:No Big Deal: Wait For The Appeal

[paeanblack]

(damn lack of spellcheck on IE)

Yes, it's quite difficult to check spelling when you are armed with nothing but a web browser.

Ridiculous

[Sciros]

This has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with trying to make more money off ads. The judge should have told the greedy buggers to take care of it on their end if they wanted the cash. In fact, they could have engineered it so that the generated *extra* revenue from those links but sadly they're complete idiots. What bothers me is stupid decisions like this are then regarded as "precedent" when they should actually be regarded as 100% BS.

A short poem:

[Anonymous Coward]

Deep link from me
And it is goatse you will see

The end.

Re:A short poem:

[Anonymous Coward]

Link please.

Slippery Slope

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a steep slope coated with AstroGlide.

If Stare Decisis holds here this could spell the end of a useful web. Everyone would just make everybody else link only to their homepage, and nobody would be able to link to content, to actual information.

The judge is, perhaps, a moron.

Re:Slippery Slope

[hahafaha]

The judge is, perhaps, a moron.

perhaps?!

Torn here

[mackil]

I'm a bit torn here, for while I think that lawsuits over this issue are a bit over the top, I do have some sympathy for SFX. I fight leeches and deep linkers from Myspace all the time. They will deep link to audio files on my site, sometimes 10 clips at a time, and have them autoplay every time someone visits their profile. As you can imagine, this sucks the bandwidth right out of my site. I've had to resort to referrer logging so I don't have a huge bill at the end of the month.

Still a lawsuit seems unnecessary, especially when there are countermeasures out there that work well.

Re:Torn here

[ScentCone]

Still a lawsuit seems unnecessary, especially when there are countermeasures out there that work well.

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 ability to escalate your defenses be your only option in stopping them? Sometimes it actually does make sense to deal with it in civil court - since obviously this guy was too much of a dick to simply stop doing it when asked. It is indeed bad enough when some loser on MySpace hot links some little JPG on your site, but piling on your MPG files has a much bigger impact on your wallet.

Re:Torn here

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say this,

Deep linking is the way the web works and there are established methods of restricting access to web content. Not restricting access to a web resource implies that you allow direct links. IOW fuck off!

This is a stupid precedent set by a stupid lawsuit involving stupid people. I don't see how anybody can be torn, it was clearly a technical issue and there was no requirement for legal proceedings. I've a good mind to deep link these mouth-breathers out of spite and I imagine a few slashdotters would join me. What are SFX going to do sue us all or restrict access like they should have done anyway?

Re:Torn here

[Rogerborg]

And bringing a lawsuit (against one individual) is cheaper than turning on referrer logging (which solves the problem in perpetuity for all leeches)? What colour is the sky on your planet?

Re:Torn here

[ScentCone]

And bringing a lawsuit (against one individual) is cheaper than turning on referrer logging (which solves the problem in perpetuity for all leeches)? What colour is the sky on your planet?

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 it off, and when they say "screw you," you have some recourse?

You're advocating an arms race, and I'm advocating a civil society.

Re:Torn here

[drinkypoo]

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?

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 door. Sure, it might be rude for someone to come inside, but in a lot of jurisdictions, it's not even illegal if it's your personal residence. They're not trespassing until you tell them to leave - this is true throughout the state of California, and "NO TRESPASSING" signs have repeatedly been shown to be useless. Now, if you lock the door, that's breaking and entering. But on the internet, there is no zoning. Any given IP address could be a vanity site, or a private computer, or a web server. So to the user, every open port that will provide data makes a machine look like an open business, and you are meant to walk through the door.

Now, to continue this bullshit, just because I can enter a building doesn't mean I can walk off with the contents. Whether the door is locked or not, taking things that don't belong to me is theft. (Let's not get into a copyright infringement discussion here. This isn't meant to fit the digital world perfectly.) So just because a port is open doesn't give you an excuse to be a jackass. On the other hand, a web server or streaming server that does not have any access control is an open invitation to receive the content. If there is a shit lock on a door and you bypass it, that still takes you up to breaking and entering. The same should be true of the digital world and as far as I know, it is in some ways, but only because it helps to establish intent.

Making a video stream publicly available is much like broadcasting a TV station in some ways. It pretty much comprises an invitation to receive it. It's unlike it in other ways, which is to say that when you broadcast a radio signal, it costs you the same to send it regardless of the number of subscribers, but the IP network doesn't work that way in spite of the promises of multicast. But this doesn't mean that we need additional legislation; it means you should be more careful. If you don't want people coming through your door, lock it. Period.

Another breakdown in your analogy is that using access control you can effectively stop people from deep-linking your content. You can require that people have a valid cookie before they can download your content, or you can do referer checking, or take any of a number of other options up to and including checking access rights and then tweaking firewall rules to permit access to the video stream. You have a vast variety of methods available to you to combat deep linking. The only way you can control access to your outlet is physically. Of course, if your external outlets aren't on their own circuit, then you have very serious problems - that is a truly idiotic design.

Re:Torn here

[hahafaha]

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?

Re:Torn here

[novus ordo]

What about people that disable their referrers due to privacy concerns? I think a better solution would be to dynamically assign the links to individual users that expire after a certain time. Of course, you could also make any given link go to your main page(or ads) pretty easily. Like for example, send each link from your podcast first to a short ad and then redirect it to the stream.

Like you said, pretty standard countermeasures but in this case these people's understanding of the legal process greatly outweighs their technical prowess. That is, sadly, something which unnecessarily burdens and ultimately undermines our legal system.

Re:Torn here

[ScentCone]

I'm always amazed at how carefully someone will pick apart a casual analogy in order to avoid actually conceding that a leeching jackass is a leeching jackass.

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 - who was asked to stop - was leveraging someone else's material in a way that implied it was his own to work with.

Re:Torn here

[hahafaha]

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 argument.

Re:Torn here

[mackil]

"What about people that disable their referrers due to privacy concerns?"

This does happen a lot actually. I've received several emails from people asking why they can't access any of the files. And for every person that emails, I'm sure there are 5 that don't. I haven't really tried anything else at this point because I don't have a lot of time to devote to the site. If only there was more etiquette on the Net... heck in the world.

Re:Torn here

[Richard_at_work]

Referrer logging is pitifully easy to defeat.

Re:Torn here

[Dunbal]

If someone is doing something completely unreasonable, why should your ability to escalate your defenses be your only option in stopping them?

      Hello? You must have led a very sheltered life. Welcome to the REAL world. Of COURSE you have to do something to defend yourself sometimes. Mommy and Daddy, or the government, shouldn't have to do it for you anymore...

Re:Torn here

[speculatrix]

this happens on ebay quite a lot with people putting img references to other people's hosted photos... I remember a particularly amusing early incident of a computer motherboard components for sale, and the victim of bandwidth replaced the photos with those of similar items on fire, and with messages such as "the seller is a con-man".

so, don't think of it as being necessarily all bad, you can have some fun with those people abusing your content... subtle games with occasional random replacement of images, especially with animated gifs with fading overlays, can be quite effective.

Re:Torn here

[sholden]

So how do you do so, not for your web browser, but for the random person's web browser who clicks a link?

Re:Torn here

[DamnStupidElf]

I'm a bit torn here, for while I think that lawsuits over this issue are a bit over the top, I do have some sympathy for SFX. I fight leeches and deep linkers from Myspace all the time. They will deep link to audio files on my site, sometimes 10 clips at a time, and have them autoplay every time someone visits their profile. As you can imagine, this sucks the bandwidth right out of my site. I've had to resort to referrer logging so I don't have a huge bill at the end of the month.

What's funny is that your site appears to just be snippets of other media, and you're complaining about leechers and deep linkers. After all, one could argue that people who want to hear snippets of audio from some work could just go obtain a copy of that work and then listen to it on their own, so your entire audience is really composed of leeches. Not that I have a problem with fair use audio samples, but I definitely don't think it's too much of a burden for you to handle referrers properly so as not to waste bandwidth, especially when the alternative means implying some arbitrary terms of service for every HTTP transaction.

Re:Torn here

[Joe U]

The only problem with that analogy is that the outlet is standing in the middle of the sidewalk with a sign that says 'publicly accessible' above it.

Re:Torn here

[DavidTC]

I'm glad someone else gets the fucking point that just because a web surfer can defeat referer logging doesn't mean a linking web site can.

Re:Torn here

[Rogerborg]

I'm not advocating an arms race, I'm advocating using referrer logging. The slippery slope is part of your deranged delusion, not mine.

Re:Torn here

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I had mod points. This is the first analogy about this situation that I've seen that actually makes any sense. Well done.

Re:Torn here

[hahafaha]

Thanks! I just hope others were more supportive... :(

Texas?

[JoshJ]

I'm no lawyer, so someone help me out here.
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".

Re:Texas?

[Pharmboy]

Copyright is not supposed to protect "your ability to generate ad revenue".

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 decide how it is distributed and profit from it.

If not, then wtf do you think copyright is FOR?

Re:Texas?

[Daemonstar]

*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?

If a judge is making a ruling, he can see how other judges have ruled in the past. If this (or something similar) comes up again, a judge can take that info into consideration in making his judgement.

Re:Texas?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 decide how it is distributed and profit from it.

Copyright grants the holder a limited monopoly on the distribution of his work. Used != Distribution.

If not, then wtf do you think copyright is FOR?

Copyright is there to prevent others from selling (unlicensed)copies of the original. Copyright is there to protect the creator's distribution rights, not to protect the supplemental ad revenue.

Example:
You write a comic book and to supplement the income of the comic book, you sell ad space with in it(a half dozen full page ads). I can buy that comic book, rip out ad pages and sell(or give away) the comic book to someone else. I can't make a copies of that comic book and sell them; regardless of whether I keep the ads in it or not.

The ads themselves are under someone else's copyright.

Re:Texas?

[mrchaotica]

If not, then wtf do you think copyright is FOR?

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.

Re:Texas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Example:
You write a comic book and to supplement the income of the comic book, you sell ad space with in it(a half dozen full page ads). I can buy that comic book, rip out ad pages and sell(or give away) the comic book to someone else. I can't make a copies of that comic book and sell them; regardless of whether I keep the ads in it or not. By ripping out part of the book, you have created a derivative work, and you may in fact not redistribute a derivative work without acquiring permission from the (all) original author(s). Just by getting permsission to distribute the comic as is, you have not obtained the right to distribute a modified version. (Ofcourse, individual owners may rip out the ads. But that's something else entirely.)

Re:Texas?

[DavidShor]

No, copyright exists to help content owners get money, usually through sales or licensing fee's, the goverment defending ad revenue.... that would be a entirely new step.

Re:Texas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright gives you the exclusive right to decide how your "information" is used...

If not, then wtf do you think copyright is FOR?

Let's break it down. Copy-right.

copy - v - to make a copy of; transcribe; reproduce.

right - n - a just claim or title, whether legal, prescriptive, or moral.

copyright - n - the exclusive right to make copies, license, and otherwise exploit a literary, musical, or artistic work, whether printed, audio, video, etc.: works granted such right by law on or after January 1, 1978, are protected for the lifetime of the author or creator and for a period of 50 years after his or her death.

So, you see, that a copyright is a specific right to be the exclusive maker of copies. I don't see where copyright gives one the right to choose how the information copyrighted is used is restricted to the copyright holder's will. Imagine, if you will, the world we would live in if use was limited in such a way. I'm sure there would be those writing books about (political) opinions that they disagree with and use copyright in this manner to stifle opposition. (I am aware of the USGS travesty, btw.)

I find this whole issue a bit distressing. The information isn't being copied nor redistributed by the link, it is being served by the owner. If they had a strong desire to limit this kind of use, there are reasonable ways to do so. Cookies, passwords, etc. Others have covered the implementation details on /. already. Instead, copyright law is being rewritten in the courts, to the detriment of the public.

Re:Texas?

[drinkypoo]

If not, then wtf do you think copyright is FOR?

Copyrights, like patents, are supposed to provide motivation to create, by giving limited protection of the rights for commercial exploitation.

HTH. HAND.

Re:Texas?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a stretch, an interesting one but I'm not buying it.

The story is the original work, protected by the author's copyright.
The ads(also original work(s)) are protected by the ad agency's copyright.

The two works are combined into one product and sold(distributed) together. One can seperate the two works and sell(or give away) each unique work per First Sale doctrine.

A derivative work would be if I changed the story or ads(s).

Re:Texas?

[Anonymous Coward]

first, it's a texas district court opinion -- because it's in the fed court system, it's not binding on texas courts.

second, it's a district court opinion....it has about zero to nill binding effect on the rest of the district courts in the state of texas...or the rest of the country.

there's really nothing to worry about unless it gets appealed higher and gets affirmed.

Re:Texas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone posting here has failed to note that Slashdot's characterization of this order is completely wrong. The judge hasn't ruled on the merits yet, he's issued a preliminary injunction while the case moves on because the plaintiff has established the likelihood of irreparable harm. The fact that the defendant is representing himself was not helping him either. It is entirely possible that the case will be quietly settled, dropped, or lost. And this is a federal DISTRICT court case, so it doesn't set a binding precendent anywhere.

Re:Texas?

[marcosdumay]

"Um, that is EXACTLY what copyright is. Copyright gives you the exclusive right to decide how your "information" is used,"

s/used/copyed/

Now, since you get it wrog, that ins't EXACTLY what copyright is... And this guy is copying nothing.

A Texas Judge?

[atamido]

This is a "United States District Judge" in Texas, not a Texas judge. Not quite the same thing.

cites != sites!

[Anonymous Coward]

cites != sites... are the proofreaders on Christmas break already?

Re:cites != sites!

[gEvil (beta)]

are the proofreaders on Christmas break already?

Already? We're still waiting for them to return from the break they started taking in 1999.

Something Awful is screwed

[ESOB]

They are constantly threatened with legal actions due to their awful link of the day section. They have in their legal threats sections several threats to sue them due to this. Something Awful always defended with their right to free speech. I guess that's no longer going to defend them and they may need to hire a real lawyer (Sorry Crabs, Please don't eat me).

Re:Something Awful is screwed

[dreddnott]

Something Awful has typically defended against legal threats by laughing in their antagonists' faces and posting their pathetic e-mails in the Legal Threats section of the website for the whole world to see. I can't seem to recall any incident where Mr. Kyanka, at least in relation to Something Awful LLC, was sued or went to court for libel, slander, or copyright violations. I'm sure Lowtax would take the parody defense if his hand was forced, and they almost always link to the home page of an ALoD webpage, in any case.

I'm not worried. You should be, though. Leonard J. Crabs is always watching, watching and waiting....

English isn't that hard...

[NoxNoctis]

Well, maybe it is. So "the article sites previous cases" does it? Tell me then, just what does it see? Ohh... You mean "cites". Gotchya.

Re:English isn't that hard...

[Stanistani]

"sights" would reference vision - "sites" references location.

Guess English is a little harder than you thought.

Gotcha back.

Re:English isn't that hard...

[everphilski]

proper english is 'cites'. You cite papers and court cases, you visit sites like the Washington monument. And I have my sights set on dinner (hungry at the moment).

Re:English isn't that hard...

[NoxNoctis]

Apparently I didn't get enough sleep. Thank you for the correct and addition.

Re:English isn't that hard...

[Stanistani]

Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, and Leetmas to all youse Slashdotters!

H0, H0, H0!

Re:English isn't that hard...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your so write! I think so to.

Re:English isn't that hard...

[whitehatlurker]

You were right the first time.

Cite - verb "to reference" - I cited that paper.
Site - noun "location" - This is my web site. (could be used as a verb.)
Sight - noun/verb related to vision - This is a sight for sore eyes.

And English is not that hard, but it appears that spelling iz.

Linking vs deep linking

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the legal difference between linking and deep linking?

Can I prohibit everyone from linking to my website at all, even to the top level?

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[Joe U]

There is no difference. There is no such thing as a 'deep link', a URL is a URL is a URL.

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.

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[harlows_monkeys]

There is no difference. There is no such thing as a 'deep link', a URL is a URL is a URL.

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.

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[mabu]

There is no difference. There is no such thing as a 'deep link', a URL is a URL is a URL.

Bullshit.

We all know what deep linking is. I assume those that are protesting this "unfair" ruling are probably actively engaged in stealing third party content and have a vested interest in promoting misinformation on this issue.

If you direct link to someone else's hosted, copyrighted, content, against their terms of service, re-packaging their content under your own brand/identity, you know you're doing something wrong. It's called "deep linking".. You're taking content outside the original context. If you link to an image of someone else's photography and put it on a non-related site, and that photo is copyrighted and not published in such a manner as to give you such rights, you are breaking the law. It's called deep linking.

This isn't some goofy frivolous legal issue. Content providers have a right to have their hard work protected from overt exploitation if they decide to share it in some part with the online community.

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[Lehk228]

this was not content embedded in the defendant's site, it was a bunch of links

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 as posted signs, fences etc. for it to be considered trespassing

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[Joe U]

I assume those that are protesting this "unfair" ruling are probably actively engaged in stealing third party content and have a vested interest in promoting misinformation on this issue.

I assume people like you fuck sheep for entertainment.

1. Stop being an asshole for a minute, read the article and respond like a normal person to avoid comments like this in the future.
2. Don't prejudge, I don't steal content and don't appreciate being called a thief.
3. Stop fucking sheep.

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[trewornan]

probably actively engaged in stealing

There's that word again: "Stealing". How many times have I seen that word used on Slashdot to justify some privilege an individual feels entitled too, used for its emotional connotations when the writer knows full well that what he's discussing is not theft.

Weasel words from human vermin.

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[that this is not und]

Content providers already have mechanisms to control how their content is accessed. It's called 'checking the referrer tag.' If they want all traffic to come in 'through a particular gateway' they can easily establish controls so that no page except the start page will work as a referrer to the so-called 'deep linked' content.

This whole mess is as ridiculous as a publisher being allowed to sue somebody because they tore out a page from their personal copy of the Yellow Pages, and so were not forced to look at the Lawyer's ads on the cover of the Yellow Pages volume before referencing the page they needed to see.

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[DavidTC]

That's not 'deep-linking', you moron, because it's not linking at all.

A 'link', in HTML, is a <a href="...">, or, as not often used, <link href="..."> in the head. And sometimes the longdesc attribute that absolutely no one uses, and probably some other obscure things. That is what 'linking' is.

Including images is not 'linking', of any sort. Embedding video is not 'linking', of any sort. A 'link' is something end users follow in HTML to go somewhere else. But let's just see what the w3c says about in the link I have cleverly provided. Then read here to see what it says about images and see if it calls including images 'linking' to them. It says images can have links around them, and they can have image maps with links, but absolutely no reference to <img> or <object> as 'links'.

'Deep-linking', as is commonly used, means 'linking into a web site far away from the root', where 'far away' is somewhat subjective. It does not mean 'representing another site's content as your own', for the obvious reasons that doesn't even make any sense...what if you presented their front page or an image on their front page, from their root, as your own? That could hardly be called 'deep'.

This site did deep-link, in the correct sense...it was to non-html documents, but they were, indeed, links and not included within a web page.

Re:Linking vs deep linking

[mabu]

Referer tag checking is not acceptable any more as a deterrent to this. Many anti-spyware software inhibits the referer tag. If you demand a certain referer tag, your web page will improperly display to a large amount of legitimate users.

this changes things a bit

[troll -1]

In some sense this provides for an absurd definition of the term "public internet". I mean linking is the same as telling someone that something exists. I wonder if I met someone at a party and I said, hey you should check out this link and I just "told" them about the URL, would I be violating the law if the URL's owner objected? What's the difference in speech between telling someone at a party and posting the same info on my blog?

Re:this changes things a bit

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Well, one's on a computer and you can click on it using a mouse. The other is a bunch of words spoken by one person to another. I don't think there's a judge on the planet who couldn't distinguish between these things.

I've never understood these "What's the difference...?" posts where someone then proceeds to describe two completely different things.

Re:this changes things a bit

[n00854180t]

That's probably the next step. Likely this judge will rule that thinking about content on the internet is an infraction punishable by death or absurd fine, and that by no means should any link URLs be thought of or transferred by way of non-digital medium (i.e., speech, paper text, smoke signals etc.).

Re:this changes things a bit

[Anonymous Coward]

In terms of the First Amendment I don't think there is a difference between the written and spoken word. They're both equally protected.

Re:this changes things a bit

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Is a computer virus protected speech?

Re:this changes things a bit

[Redlazer]

The difference in your comparison is simple:

The internet costs money to maintain. Bandwidth costs money. Videos and music take up lots of bandwidth, and a very popular website getting a lot of hits is a blessing and a curse.

Speaking words to a friends cost no one anything - sharing an idea or telling someone a story, instead of giving them a link to the website which contains the story, costs no one anything.

And no, im not saying we should stop using the internet blah blah blah.

-Red

Re:this changes things a bit

[ScentCone]

I wonder if I met someone at a party and I said, hey you should check out this link and I just "told" them about the URL, would I be violating the law if the URL's owner objected?

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

[belmolis]

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.

Re:this changes things a bit

[max born]

Obviously a virus is no more protected than slander (saying something) or libel (writing something), or yelling fire in a crowded theater. But saying you can post something on the net AND prevent others from telling people about it kinda changes the paradigm. What about, for example, images.google.com? According to this ruling, anyone who owns an image can prevent google from linking to it in a search. Don't know about you, but I think this is a pretty absurd ruling.

Re:this changes things a bit

[Dunbal]

The internet costs money to maintain. Bandwidth costs money.

      So make damned sure when you design your site that you will get some ad revenue. Let's take this one step further: To be honest I think the advertisers should sue the plaintiff for designing a shitty site that allowed people to bypass the ads, no?

Re:this changes things a bit

[n00854180t]

It is an absurd ruling, since it puts the responsibility of guaranteeing revenue based on public content on the shoulders of the legal system, and also simultaneously defines the basic use of the internet as grounds for lawsuit. Apparently, some judges lack the basic reasoning skills of a toaster.

Re:this changes things a bit

[Kuciwalker]

Criticism, particularly political criticism, is covered by fair use.

Re:this changes things a bit

[beej]

I think it is.

Distributing one with intent to harm, that's illegal.

But writing them, distributing them to people who want them, and telling people how to write them is, afaik, still legal.

Especially if you print it in a book, which is one place judges are afraid to touch.

Re:this changes things a bit

[belmolis]

Yes, but the problem is that if you have a general prohibition on deep linking it overrides fair use, just as the DMCA in combination with DRM does. You may have a fair use right to use the material, but you've got no legal way of doing so.

I can't believe it...

[joNDoty]

If you don't want your content to be linked to, don't make it accessible through a URL!

Re:I can't believe it...

[mabu]

I'm really amazed at some of the ignorant responses here. Just because something is accessible doesn't mean that gives you permission to steal and exploit it.

Re:I can't believe it...

[Amazing Quantum Man]

How was the guy "steal"ing it? He didn't copy it on his own server. He left it on the plaintiff's server and posted a link to it.

I guess CmdrTaco should get the death penalty for all those links to copyrighted content he posts on this site.

Re:I can't believe it...

[recursiv]

How can something given for free be stolen?

Re:I can't believe it...

[drinkypoo]

I'm really amazed at some of the ignorant responses here. Just because something is accessible doesn't mean that gives you permission to steal and exploit it.

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 - because he made no attempt to prevent people from consuming the content in this way. In fact he explicitly had to make it available for it to be available - video content you create isn't automatically on the internet. Thus simply by placing it on the internet without any access control, he in effect granted permission for anyone to download it.

It's also not theft because no deprivation of property occurred. It's true that some transfer costs were incurred; however, since he is the individual who made the content available, only he can reasonably be held responsible for those costs. See, "theft" is when you actually take something from someone, depriving them of physical property. This is the reason why the law does not refer to copying some data as "theft". They refer to it as "copyright infringement" which is a breach of an entirely separate law from an entirely different portion of the code.

Re:I can't believe it...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you go to library catalogue number QA 1342.43 in the local library, second shelf on the right at the top of the stairs on the third floor, you'll find the book of interest.

Oh, wait, I didn't force you to go through the library's catalogue system for yourself to find it. My bad.

Hello? Providing the *location* of something that *could* be stolen and exploited isn't giving permission to do so. You may simply want to check that book out of the library, or maybe you want to do something nefarious like stealing it, damaging it, or copying the whole thing. NOT MY FAULT OR PROBLEM. If the library wants to prevent that sort of thing, then it is dependent on their security implementation. Providing a location is not endorsing the act of doing something illegal. It merely says something is over there.

But let's have it your way, and make half the web illegal, if copyright holders decide that they don't like the way other people link to the content *they* put up on the web for other people to view.

Re:I can't believe it...

[istartedi]

Sorry. Car thieves who steal autos with the keys left in the ignition still go to jail. Everybody knows cars aren't there for the taking. If you see something pretty on a web site, browse back to the root page, read the TOS, and see that direct links are prohibited, you are in violation of the TOS. IANAL, but that sounds like a civil matter as opposed to criminal, but the concept is the same. An open door does not give you permission to enter my house.

Re:I can't believe it...

[Dunbal]

I'm really amazed at some of the ignorant responses here. Just because something is accessible doesn't mean that gives you permission to steal and exploit it.

      No, the content was still there after it was linked to. No one stole anything. What happened was the plaintiff thought he could count on people clicking on ads "out of the goodness of their hearts" to finance the bandwidth, and that's just not true. It's like a non cable tv station complaining because people turn the volume down or switch to another channel during commercials. The information was freely accessible. It would be stealing if it the stream was gotten to from a private "member's area" and the security/billing part was bypassed. This is just faulty design on the part of the plaintiff, and instead of learning from their mistakes and making the next one better, they decide to "sue". Yeah, uhh, good luck with that...

Re:I can't believe it...

[n00854180t]

Wow, you have no understanding of the definition of "theft" do you? To be able to steal something, it first must either not belong to you, or not be available for no cost. Considering that the content in the plaintiff's site doesn't even meet the basic definition of things that *can* be stolen, there was no theft involved. If publishing URLs = theft, then every person that has ever used the internet is guilty of theft and should be required to pay indeterminate sums.

Re:I can't believe it...

[bugnuts]

It's like a non cable tv station complaining because people turn the volume down or switch to another channel during commercials.

No, it's like a tv station broadcasting another station's shows, and inserting their own commercials during the breaks.

It's amazing that people actually think something "free" under certain terms somehow means it can't be stolen.

Re:I can't believe it...

[joNDoty]

An open door does not give you permission to enter my house. He didn't enter your house. He told other people your address and mentioned that you leave your front door open.

Re:I can't believe it...

[honkycat]

A television rebroadcast involves obvious copyright violation. Linking to a file? The only copy was made by the original rights holder and transmitted to the recipient. It's not obvious to me where the illegality on behalf of the linker derives from.

Re:I can't believe it...

[fm6]

Car thieves who steal autos with the keys left in the ignition still go to jail.

Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that the car owner doesn't have some responsibility. Suppose you heard somebody say, "Oh, I always leave my keys in the ignition — if it gets stolen, the cops will just get it back for me." You'd think he was pretty stupid, right? By the same token, you wonder at the intelligence who spends a lot of money on legal action to get a result that could more easily be obtained by reconfiguring the server.

Re:I can't believe it...

[Yo_mama]

He wasn't "stealing" video streams per se; he was stealing bandwidth and server resources, which are items you do have to pay for in most situations.

Re:I can't believe it...

[foreverdisillusioned]

He wasn't stealing those; the plaintiff's server was programmed to SERVE HIM that content. If you build a robot and program it to give all of the furniture in your house away, you can't turn around and call it theft when your neighbors accept it. Stupidity is no excuse; if this guy didn't want his data being "stolen" then he should not have GIVEN IT AWAY. There are perfectly acceptable, widespread means of access restrictions he could have implemented...

it's their own dang fault...

[thekm]

...if they don't like it, they should just stop it. By tighting the rules about the referrer header, you can make sure that people browsing your site do so in the exact way you want.

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!

Re:it's their own dang fault...

[mabu]

Stealing is stealing.

Your response is analogous to the idea that just because my bicycle is on my own property, clearly labeled and locked up, that it's my own fault it was stolen because I didn't have a bigger lock.

People who deep link know exactly what they're doing. They're stealing content from other sites for their own gain. Regardless of whether or not the hosting site has elaborate referer restrictions or other crap, is irrelevant.

Stealing is stealing.

Re:it's their own dang fault...

[n00854180t]

So, by your logic the government's sole job should be to prevent the possibility of so-called "theft" (which, your definition is actually incorrect, since to steal something, the thief would have to gain access to it by means other than the owner's approved channels, which isn't the case: the owner of the content in this case made said content publicly available, and thus no stealing took place) of revenue from any individual or company. You sir, are insane.

Re:it's their own dang fault...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's like telling someone "look, there's a bike over there", and then suing the ass off the person that said that if your bike gets stolen, whether or not you had a decent lock on it or any lock at all. Any rational person would do what you're suggesting -- install a decent lock. But, no, the person in this case is implying they should be able to leave their bike wide open, and that people who notice and make mention of that fact should be prosecuted for robbery as some kind of accessory.

You're right that thieves know exactly what they are doing, but that doesn't mean it should be illegal for people to say "look at that nice, unattended bike X located right here", or "look, Joe left his front door wide open again". It may facilitate stealing, it may even be unethical to widely distribute the information, but it is not stealing.

As the article mentions from a previous case, providing a link is not copying, so how in the HELL can it violate copyright or, really, have anything to do with it at all? Can a publisher restrict the way a library catalogues their books because people could illegally copy the book?

Re:it's their own dang fault...

[thekm]

Your analogy missed the mark, simply because the site we're talking about locked nothing up. The bike is sitting there with almost a sign on it saying "have a ride". You're trying to imply that just because it's on your property and somebody rides it and puts the bike back is in fact stealing.

A website with *public* URL's and nothing else is public library. And what they want is a book store where they can drive revenue. Some other place says "this is a good read, and you can go to the library and read it there for free". So, you send people there, and they go to the library, straight to the book, and have a good read.

Now, linking to the other site isn't downloading the other site's content, and hosting it yourself. *this* would be stealing. The other site is just saying that there is great content accessible in public space, and they should go there to look at it.

If you're book store that's set up like a public lirbary, then you need to change things so that you get the revenue you need. If your site is too public, and you need to make sure people go through *your* channels so you can drive revenue... then that's exactly what they should do.


The people using the deep links aren't stealing anything. A closer analogy is a cinema. It's all about people viewing things. Drive-in's go to a great deal of pain to make sure that the areas where you can view the screen from outside the parking lot fence obscures the view so people can't get freebies. Cinemas create buildings, and regulate entry with people collecting tickets, and removing the windows so people can't see it for free. Public URL's are a drive-in where there's parking spaces right next to the fence where you get an unobstructed view and fantastic reception on the FM station to get the sound. You're not "stealing", you're just not driving the revenue that the vendor would like.

Vendors should protect revenue streams. Real-world businesses protect their own, so should an online one. Being able to freely access something without doing anything (like standing there watching something in the public domain) is in the realm of fair use.

The fools should do it for themselves and their own customers. If I find out that I can view the content I want without going past all the ads, then I'm going to go right to that content. If they built their site correctly, they'd protect themselves from people such as myself missing their ad imprints... it's not about deep linking. It's about human nature, and having plenty of technical facilities on a website to define what really is an is not "public" and "free".


The internet was made to be all about sharing (how nice). If you had something to share, you put it on a site where people can get it. And to make it easier on people, you provide pages to browse more easier to things. But then, commerce came, and things became "private" on the internet. There's plenty of ways to make things secure and private on the internet, and these boneheads didn't do it. They hosted their files in publicly accessible form just like the good ol' days. They have their content freely accessible without any form of guidance through the mechanisms that drive their revenue... in short, they're fools.

Re:it's their own dang fault...

[DaveRobb]

Your response is analogous to the idea that just because my bicycle is on my own property, clearly labeled and locked up, that it's my own fault it was stolen because I didn't have a bigger lock.

Deep linking has nothing to do with the size of the lock. THERE IS NO LOCK. If I can get to some content simply by asking the webserver for it (ie no http auth, no cookie, no nothing, just an HTTP GET) then the "lock" you speak of does not exist.

People who deep link know exactly what they're doing. They're stealing content from other sites for their own gain.

They are not stealing the content. They are simply saying where it is.

Re:it's their own dang fault...

[mabu]

Deep linking has nothing to do with the size of the lock. THERE IS NO LOCK. If I can get to some content simply by asking the webserver for it (ie no http auth, no cookie, no nothing, just an HTTP GET) then the "lock" you speak of does not exist.

So what you're saying is, if there is "no lock" meaning no facility to make the content restrictive, then it's not stealing? That's a fair assumption, but what constitutes "a lock?"

Would you agree if someone has referer protection, and someone bypasses this, that would be theft?

Well, how is that any different from a copyright notice at the bottom of every page, or a copyright on the content itself which says "this content cannot be republished without permission". That's "a lock" too. It makes it quite clear the content is not to be freely deep linked.

Re:it's their own dang fault...

[mabu]

So, by your logic the government's sole job should be to prevent the possibility of so-called "theft" (which, your definition is actually incorrect, since to steal something, the thief would have to gain access to it by means other than the owner's approved channels, which isn't the case: the owner of the content in this case made said content publicly available, and thus no stealing took place) of revenue from any individual or company. You sir, are insane.

How come no Hitler reference? You must be slipping.

You should try your theory in real life. Here's what you need to do. Go into a supermarket and go to the produce section. Look! Nothing is locked up! So just start taking produce and eating it. Have a seat. Start eating. There isn't a sign anywhere that says you can't do it, so it must be OK. You "gained access" to the produce through "approved channels" therefore what's the problem? It's there for eating. You obviously can't imagine any other reason these people would let you look at the produce freely unless they wanted you to eat it. You don't see anyone around asking for money near the produce. Therefore, it's well within your right to just munch away. Knock yourself out Einstein. You may have figured out the solution to world hunger!

Re:it's their own dang fault...

[DaveRobb]

Would you agree if someone has referer protection, and someone bypasses this, that would be theft?

I'm not sure I'd count it as theft, since in the case being looked at here the person linking to the content (whether they're bypassing the referer protection or not) isn't actually the one retrieving the content. Can you be charged with theft if you have a sign pointing to where the spare key to a house is? Probably not, but you might get done as an accessory.

Well, how is that any different from a copyright notice at the bottom of every page, or a copyright on the content itself which says "this content cannot be republished without permission". That's "a lock" too. It makes it quite clear the content is not to be freely deep linked.

Again I have a problem with the idea that linking to content (deeply or otherwise) counts as publishing it. If you made a copy of it and hosted it on your own webserver then fine, that's in violation of copyright. But linking to something isn't the same. The original "owner" is still in control of the content and how and when it is served up.

It occurs to me that a interesting way of determining if this aspect of the copyright on something has been violated is whether or not the copyright holder can still choose NOT to publish the content. If they have that ability, then their copyright is still intact. If not, then obviously there are copies out there under their control.

You're both n00bz

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot never had proofreaders.

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

1999: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/1999/08/12/deep _links/ covers several lawsuits seven years ago about deep linking without permission. I can't remember which one set the precedent that you need permission; and started the "linking guidelines" pages most sites now have, but I do remember one of them did get through, and yes you do officially need to have permission to link to anyhting other than the homepage.

BTW, this was an issue when Harvard/Yale/Stanford/MIT or whoever it was "hacked" another university's website by simply guessing what the URL was going to be while making admissions decisions.

I despair

[Anonymous Coward]

The web implicitly allows deep linking, idiots who can't deny access to web clients without a valid session cookie should not be operating a web site. There is no problem, therefore this non-problem did not require a legal ruling.

To summize;

• Petitioner = retard
• Defendant = retard
• Judge = retard

Great...

[HAL9000_mirror]

Call me exaggerating but we are moving towards a world of disconnected Internet. Really, start with saying one cannot link content. Next say go one level down and bring policies about linking at router level. We can devolve to where we started (single PC) and declare victory on safer computing.

Re:Great...

[Dunbal]

disconnected Internet

      Hmmm - what do we call it? We'd have to drop the inter and just call it "net".

I guess google is illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

bye bye

Re:I guess google is illegal

[bwd234]

No, Google has the money and lawyers to fight off a stupid-ass ******* like this. Only you and I and some other poor guy who wants to link to a cool page he saw on the Net will be stopped. Remeber, laws are there to protect the rich and control the poor....nothing else, that's all!

Re:I guess google is illegal

[mabu]

Google links to site providers directly.

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.

Re:I guess google is illegal

[that this is not und]

Google also 'caches' copies of pages. So a site publisher can have a page up that they later regret having posted. People can still view the content by viewing the google cached copy.

This seems far more eggregious than 'deep linking' and yet because google is one of the 500 pound gorillas nobody makes a peep about it.

Ad blockers.

[Spazntwich]

What implications does this have for ad blockers? If "denying profit by not viewing ads" is now illegal, isn't any software that blocks advertisements going to soon be illegalish?

Where Does It End?

[TheCrayfish]

So, now linking to a publicly-accessible file on a web server is a copyright infringement? What if I simply publish the URL on my site but without the hyperlink? What if I publish the URL of an "unlinkable" file in the newspaper? How can telling people the LOCATION of information infringe on the rights of the copyright holder?

Re:Where Does It End?

[crabpeople]

"How can telling people the LOCATION of information infringe on the rights of the copyright holder?"

Well thats the logic/laws that they take bittorrent trackers down with.

Re:Where Does It End?

[chuhwi]

Yeah, they'd better start suing public libraries; their catalogs tell people where to get copyrighted information, a clear violation of the creator's rights.

Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[Futurepower(R)]

Quote: "A Texas judge has ruled..."

Another ignorant influence coming from Texas.

The proper defense against deep linking is technical. A judge should not get involved.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[mabu]

The proper defense against deep linking is technical.

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 rationale is way off.

Stealing is stealing. If you take someone else's restricted content and exploit it, that's theft. We're not talking about linking to someone else's web site. People with half a brain know what's going on. There's a difference between linking to someone's site and taking their content, repackaging it on your own, and using their hard work to make money for yourself.

Technical solutions are nice, but legal solutions are necessary. That's the only way the spam problem will ever be solved... when they start putting those spammer criminals in jail, things will improve.. long before the 1,987,300th incarnation of anti-spam filtration appears to half-ass work.

Stealing is stealing. It amazes me that people seem to think digital information is somehow different from property in other formats... of course everyone changes their tune when they get ripped off themselves. Hypocrites.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[Anonymous Coward]

Stealing is stealing. If you take someone else's restricted content and exploit it, that's theft.

The content wasn't restricted, it was/is freely available to anyone. One just had to navigate thru the website to reach it. The other guy was just providing a link straight to the material aka deep linking.

Stealing is stealing. It amazes me that people seem to think digital information is somehow different from property in other formats

Digital information is different from other property. The cost of reproducing digital information is near-zero, the cost of reproducing physical property is non-zero. Digital information can be shared/given to other without depriving the original holder of it.

If something is freely available to the general public, how can it be stolen?

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[Dunbal]

If you take someone else's restricted content and exploit it, that's theft.

      You are the one who is WAY off.

      You can't go to a movie without going through a "barrier", where someone takes your ticket and rips it in half. You can't go to a concert without going through a barrier. You can't go to a sporting event without going through a barrier. In some restaurants you have to pay first. In others you pay after the meal, but try to make it out the door without paying and you'll see what it feels like to have the entire staff chase you.

      If you are dumb enough to hold and event in a PUBLIC PLACE - and a website IS a public place, don't complain if people watch without "paying". You either have to restrict access to this stream by having people pay before they can see it, or you put your revenue generating ads IN the damned stream. Or you make it impossible for people to link to it by having it in Flash, etc. This is the equivalent to putting a fence around your venue, and charging people at the door. THEN and ONLY then you can accuse someone who tries to jump the fence of being a thief. But if you have your venue in public with just a line drawn on the ground saying "do not cross without paying", people will watch, and people won't pay if they don't HAVE to. If you expect them to do otherwise then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[Brandybuck]

I suspect that most people in Texas aren't the herd of clones you make them out to be. I also suspect that most people in Texas don't give a shit about your opinion.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[theLOUDroom]

The argument you're making is simply:
"I don't like it, therefore it should be illegal."

This argument is simply... stupid.
There are important techincal differences between what is going on in this case, and spam.
Obviously you don't give a damn about them as you fail to reference ANY of the technical details.

Stealing is stealing. It amazes me that people seem to think digital information is somehow different from property in other formats

Because it FUCKING IS!
Putting up a website without controls is like printing a virtually infinite handbills and putting them in a public place. Now these guys are upset that someone is handing out the location of this stack of handbills? Tough shit.
If you don't like it, don't put your stuff out on the street with a sign that says "Take Me".

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[mabu]

The argument you're making is simply:
"I don't like it, therefore it should be illegal."

This argument is simply... stupid.

That argument is stupid. But that's not the argument I'm making.

What part of stealing do you not understand? Do you know what stealing means? It doesn't mean "I don't like it." Who's being stupid?

If I'm a photographer, and I put pictures that I took up on my web site, that cost me time and money to produce, that I own the copyright to, that I do NOT give anyone else permission to republish without my approval. And you deep link a picture from my web site onto your page of "great cool wallpaper for free" that you're using to attract traffic so you can make money with google ads, you're stealing from me. What part of this do you not understand?

I weep for the future when kids these days have no concept of responsibility.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[mabu]

Bad analogy.

Explain that one to your college professor, when you plaigerize some content that "was in a public place, so it's mine dehrrrrrrrrrrrr" See how far you get.

This is not a passive process. If you take a picture of the Coca-Cola logo that's in a public place, see how far you're going to get if you stick that logo on a box of gum and try to sell it. See if your "Hey, that logo was in a public place so I can use it..." excuse will work.

Better yet, go someplace and listen to a band perform. Pull out your telephone and record their show. Then produce some CDs or DVDs of their performance and start selling them. See how far you get. See how much the band appreciates you using their material to make money for yourself without their permission.

But wait! It was a public place... I can do whatever I want with it.

NO YOU CAN'T.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[mabu]

Digital information is different from other property. The cost of reproducing digital information is near-zero, the cost of reproducing physical property is non-zero. Digital information can be shared/given to other without depriving the original holder of it.

Irrelevant.

If you think this is a good idea, then stop going to school, quit your day job and go around taking pictures and videotaping other stuff in public. Then re-sell that stuff as if it were your own. After all, it's only "digital information". It's not "hurting anybody". So "What's the problem?"

Theft is not limited to tangible property. Intellectual property can also be stolen.

Imagine if you were Charles Schulz and you created the Charlie Brown comic strip. You spent money to protect your idea, and got trademarks and copyrights. Then some wanker on Slashdot figures, since he's not taking anything physical, he sees no problem with drawing his own version of your cartoon characters, publishing these in a book, and exploiting the notoriety and intellectual property you've worked so hard to develop. If you cared about your work, you'd sue his ass off, and he'd deserve it, because despite the fact that he didn't physically steal anything from you, he has taken your intellectual property and exploited it for his own personal gain. That Slashdot wanker would be morally, as well as legally wrong, even as he ignorantly rationalized that since it was intangible, and you let him read your comics in a public place, it was perfectly OK.

It's not ok. It's called stealing.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[Anonymous Coward]

> If I'm a photographer, and I put pictures that I took up on my web site, that cost me time and money to produce,
> that I own the copyright to, that I do NOT give anyone else permission to republish without my approval. And you
> deep link a picture from my web site onto your page of "great cool wallpaper for free" that you're using to attract
> traffic so you can make money with google ads, you're stealing from me. What part of this do you not understand?

> I weep for the future when kids these days have no concept of responsibility.

Oh, the irony. Why don't YOU take responsibility for what you publish on the web?

You are completely missing the point that this situation is NOT analogous to real-world stealing, because you can't steal what is given to you. If the grocery store is GIVING away produce, they can't complain when someone grabs some tomatoes, steps out the door, and sells them to people passing by on the sidewalk.

When you put your photos on an unsecured URL, you are publishing them. That's exactly what "web publishing" means.

When the other guy re-directs someone to YOUR server, he is not "republishing," any more than the Yellow Pages are stealing your photography services by publishing your ad. Whether they charge for the listing is irrelevant, just as it's irrelevant that people bypass your other ads to get to the Yellow Pages one.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[mabu]

You can rationalize all you want. But you have a very naive, ignorant idea of what does and does not constitute theft. Luckily for the rest of responsible society, the law isn't based around goofy, erroneous, irrational ideas such as yours.

Just because something, tangible or not, is ACCESSIBLE, does not give you the right to use it for whatever purpose you desire without restriction. If you can't figure this out, please make sure you're sterile so whatever flawed genetic code you have does not propagate. Thanks!

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[Anonymous Coward]

> Just because something, tangible or not, is ACCESSIBLE, does not give you the right to use it for whatever purpose you desire without restriction

Nobody is arguing that you can do this. Few are even suggesting it's ethical.

To be blunt: you can't argue that when someone gives you the right to download their content for free, the ownership of the content gives them any LEGAL right to forbid you telling from someone else how to download it for free - or even to CHARGE someone for the information.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[Anonymous Coward]

> You can rationalize all you want. But you have a very naive, ignorant idea of what does and does not constitute theft.
> Luckily for the rest of responsible society, the law isn't based around goofy, erroneous, irrational ideas such as yours.

Translation: "I'm right, you're wrong. You don't see things my way, so damn your logic, reason, and understanding of the law."

Too bad common sense and legal precedent are not on your side.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[mabu]

The content is provided with restrictions. That's the way web sites work. Maybe this whole "web" thing is new to you? Maybe this whole "copyright" thing is new to you and you don't understand these concepts. Maybe you don't understand if you buy a book from the book store, you can't make 10,000 copies of it, put your own name on it and sell it. Why? Because it's called "stealing". It's copyright infringement.

You are desperately holding onto a very narrow view of what this issue involves, and your view is not what happened in this case, nor what the judge was evaluating. You have a weird perfect scenario in your head that doesn't resemble this issue or the facts of the case, or anything even remotely relevant to the argue over deep linking. I've wasted too much time trying to reason with you when it's undoubtedly pointless.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[Anonymous Coward]

> The content is provided with restrictions. That's the way web sites work.

No, the way web sites work is: you make a request from a browser via a URL, and the server either accepts or denies it.

You say "the content is provided with restrictions," but there are no technical or legal restrictions to serving content this way. There is ONLY the provider's request that you access it through their own web site. You can decide whether it's ethical to sidestep that request, but it certainly is legal, and it is NOT copyright violation to do so.

> Maybe you don't understand if you buy a book from the book store, you can't make 10,000 copies of it,
> put your own name on it and sell it. Why? Because it's called "stealing". It's copyright infringement.

I understand that perfectly well; it's you who doesn't understand that your example is NOT analogous to this case. The plaintiff made the mistake of promising something to their sponsors and delivering something else. It's like they said "we agree sell your book at B. Dalton bookstores" and then provided free copies to every bookstore under the sun.

If the defendant had grabbed the audio content from the plaintiff's site and served it up on his OWN web server, then your example would be applicable. That's not what happened here, and if you don't understand why the digital realm and the web make it different from the bookstore, then I can't help you.

The core of the problem here is that the content provider would like VERY MUCH for the web to work differently than it does, because it suits his business model. Unfortunately, instead of finding a technical solution, he sued to make the defendant obey how HE would like the web to work. As a result, legitimate browsing is endangered because you have NO WAY of knowing whether any particular URL is supposed to be "restricted" or not. It's antithetical to the very principle of hypertext.

Re:Texas ignorance and arrogance again

[theLOUDroom]

What part of stealing do you not understand?

The part where you haven't provided a single instance of theft actually taking place.
Perhaps it is you who need a refresher on what "stealing" means.

If I'm a photographer, and I put pictures that I took up on my web site, that cost me time and money to produce, that I own the copyright to, that I do NOT give anyone else permission to republish without my approval.

There is no "republishing" going on. The only source providing that content is you.
This statement is factually incorrect.

And you deep link a picture from my web site onto your page of "great cool wallpaper for free" that you're using to attract traffic so you can make money with google ads, you're stealing from me. What part of this do you not understand?

The part where you've completely redefined "stealing" to mean "making money by providing a link to content I have provided for free and without restriction on the internet".
It's simply a stupid argument. You had to go out of your way to put this content on the web and you chose the restrictions you would put in place when you did so. If you don't like it, you can stop this "stealing" at any time simply by altering your webserver or simply removing the content. Expecting that law to enforce restrictions after the fact on content you knowingly made publicly accessible is ridiculous.
You're running a server on the internet that was configured to send these people files and now you want the government to break the internet because you're too stupid to set up a webserver.

Texas Justice

[Doc Ruby]

The way to deal with this is for browsers to look for standard redistribution licenses, like Creative Commons gradations, in a standard place, like http://website.domain.tld/copyright-license.xml , much like robots.txt against searching. Then the browser should display a big brown "BULLSHIT" stamp across any page published on the Web without access control.

And make posting messages to maillists with 40-line ".sigs" threatening torture and nuke attack when anyone redistributes some message posted from some corporate email account a call to arms for finding the poster. With a mob of angry list subscribers armed with torches and pitchforks.

We'll get this Intubeweb thang unkinked and safe for democracy someday.

Haven't RTFA, but...

[DimGeo]

... seems reasonable. Just send an e-mail before making a deep link, or just take the link down if someone complains (which should happen, like, almost never if your site isn't too popular). No sweat there. In the extremely unlikely event that you can't post the link, you can still point at the main site and quote how to get to the interesting stuff (like, click here and find this link and select this option, etc).

The question on everyone's mind is...

[michaelmalak]

Does this make it illegal to link to the "printable view" of a newspaper story instead of the advertisement view? Will Drudge start changing the way he links?

(I always linked to the advertisement view from my blog, just out of fairness.)

Killing the messenger

[novus ordo]

How can they be sure that the people that used this guy's website would have watched this podcasted event otherwise? This guy should have been paid for free advertising he brought to this event instead of getting sued. Also instead of putting the ads in the podcast itself, they put it on the website. That is just poor business decision making.

"SFX will likely suffer immediate and irreparable harm when the new racing season begins in mid-December 2006 if Davis is not enjoined from posting links to the live racing Webcasts. The court agrees that if Davis is not enjoined from providing unauthorized Webcast links on his Web site, SFX will lose its ability to sell sponsorships or advertisement on the basis that it is the exclusive source of the Webcasts, and such loss will cause irreparable harm."

Somebody call Google!

robots.txt

[Nom du Keyboard]

Why not have/require that the robots.txt protocol should also be followed for deep linking. While obviously voluntary, it would allow an easy line in the sand to indicate if anyone has broached the limits you've set by obviously publicly publishing your pages on the web. The pages are clearly public if you can go directly to them without some referrer code added by the site.

The biggest problem I see here is that these issues are being decided by judges who never attended a Computer Science class in their life, let alone became experts about the issues involved.

Re:robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, thats a stupid idea. If you don't want your shit linked to, then don't publish it. robots.txt was designed to be parsed by bots, not people. It doesn't make sense to look at a robots.txt before creating an anchor tag, either.

Re:robots.txt

[that this is not und]

site hoovering tip:

To ignore robots.txt

put the line:

robots=off

in your ~/.wgetrc file.

If you don't already have a .wgetrc file create one. It's in the manpages, though few websites explaining it exist.

whew...thought this was about albumbase.

[Falladir]

So does this mean that it's still 'ok' to compile links to infringing material hosted elsewhere, as albumbase.com does?

This finding won't last long. Deep doesn't have to be very deep, does it? Clearly if the link allows a user to bypass the font page (indx.html or whatever) then the link denies the webmaster whatever revenue might have been generated by traffic at the front page. Unless the user were smart enough to bookmark the deeper site himself, or something really diabolical like that.

I bet that site gets multiply-deep-linked by X-mas

[davidwr]

I bet by Monday the plaintiff will find his site deep-linked from web sites all around the world.

This will force him to either give up or implement common technical fixes to prevent deep-linking, making his legal fight a waste of money.

Last line

[kevin_conaway]

There is no evidence that SFX tried technical countermeasures, such as referrer logging and blocking anyone coming from Davis' site.

Isn't that irrelevant? If this is indeed illegal, they shouldn't have to do things like that.

Its kind of like a store owner who doesn't properly secure his shop at night. Is it his fault that thugs broke in and stole his stuff? Sure he could have done a better job and put up a metal door and bars on the windows, but that doesn't exhonerate the thieves.

Re:Last line

[Shados]

Though the amount of effort required to stop referer links is so minimal, that an appropriate analogy would be a convenience store (aka: a public place that you can reasonably expect to be open at night) who left the door WIDE OPEN at night, then complain that someone entered.

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 door".

We're not talking about an entire cryptographic implementation here: just an htaccess file or a 10 line scripts would have stopped it, and it has been the COMMONLY ACCEPTED way, until today, to do this. Why change it?

Re:Last line

[Arker]

If it's illegal, the world wide web as a whole is illegal.

And your analogy is simply not analogous.

No one broke into the plaintiffs site. The defendant did not copy any copyrighted material from the plaintiffs site. He simply published the *location* of the material in question. When someone clicked on the link on the defendants site, their browser would then send a *request* to the plaintiffs server, which then copied the material and transmitted it in response.

Plaintiff had the option to configure their server NOT to make a copy and send it in such situations, but to return a 'Forbidden' error message instead, if they did not wish to allow this. As it was their server, whose configuration was entirely in their control, any copying done was done by them.

This is a very poor decision. From what I can see, it can probably be ascribed to the very poor defense mounted by the defendant. However, a 'justice system' that perpetrates injustice simply because one party is unable to retain a high powered law firm to defend them is a big problem. The US system at this point in time seems to have a lot more to do with guaranteeing income for lawyers than serving justice.

Re:Last line

[Brandybuck]

If this is indeed illegal...

It is not illegal. It's only one judge's opinion. Expect this to be overturned in an apellate court.

Re:Last line

[Lithdren]

Its kind of like a store owner who doesn't properly secure his shop at night. Is it his fault that thugs broke in and stole his stuff? Sure he could have done a better job and put up a metal door and bars on the windows, but that doesn't exhonerate the thieves. Try explaining such a concept to his insurance company.

Re:No Big Deal: Wait For The Appeal-SPELCHEK!

[Nom du Keyboard]

(damn lack of spellcheck on IE)

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.

Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot, you're breaking the law.
I'ma sueeee yooouuuu

-news.com.com management

http://slashdot.org/

There now you can sue me back

The Internet is fine

[ePhil_One]

No, actually, they pretty much broke the internet. There are well-established ways of preventing linking from outside pages (using cookies, checking referrer: tags, etc.).

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 deep links, it merely affirms the owner of said targets the right to say "stop".

Re:The Internet is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly, they have the right to say "stop" and the way a website says stop is by not serving content to requests from elsewhere. Period. If your webserver answers requests for links then you are saying "don't stop". This is about the fundamental nature of http man! The technology makes no distinction based upon some imagined "depth" of linking. How do you even measure that? Number of characters in the URL? Seriously.

Re:The Internet is fine

[Chandon Seldon]

Links exist (were designed into the WWW) to allow people to be pointed to documents. Not "web sites", specific documents. That's the big advantage that the web has over protocals like Gopher and FTP that existed before - you can link to something specific rather than pointing in a vague direction and making the user find the specific document themselves.

This works fine for most web sites. Even services like youtube are designed around this model. If you can't handle this, go set up a gopher site.

Re:The Internet is fine

[bunions]

Ok, yes, thanks for the condescending post, but you didn't really address this issue:

> This decision in no way forbids linking to deep links, it merely affirms the owner of said targets the right to say "stop".

We all know how the web works. Now, a brief lesson in how the world works: if I ask you not to do take advantage of my property by trespassing or borrowing it or whatever, you should stop. The fact that you CAN trespass because I haven't set up stone walls around my property doesn't mean it's ok for you to do so. Now this applies to the internet as well. Deep link all you want, this decision doesn't change anything. What it DOES change is that now I get to ask you not to, and you'll be fined if you don't comply. It's basically "don't be a jerk" codified into law. I fail to see the problem.

ps: 'condescending' means 'talk down to'

Re:The Internet is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Deep linking is what sets the world wide web apart from its predecessors such as Gopher. Deep linking is what makes the World Wide Web a web. It's what makes it possible to link directly to a Wikipedia article, news article, or a random page on a blog. Deep linking is exactly what the world wide web was designed for. To claim that deep linking is not okay is to claim that the world wide web is not okay.

Someone else posted an excellent analogy of what's going on from a technical perspective. If they don't like people taking advantage of their free stuff, they should stop giving out free stuff to everyone that asks.

This decision in no way forbids linking to deep links, it merely affirms the owner of said targets the right to say "stop".

This is a first amendment issue. I can tell the world you are giving out free cookies at your bakery every Monday morning and no one--not even the government--can compel me to stop saying it. I have a first amendment right to speak the truth. A web link is a digital footnote. It says, "some interesting content exists at this location. Check it out if you want to." A web site should not be able to prohibit me from identifying my sources any more than a library should be able to prohibit me from telling people about a particular book on the shelves.

Re:The Internet is fine

[John Nowak]

I fail to see the problem.

While this is obvious, you don't need to be a jerk about it. People are not allowed to walk on your property because walking on someone's private property without their permission is illegal -- It isn't as if it is legal only until you say it isn't, which is the analogy you're making with regards to deep links. Besides, it is more like someone pointing at your yard than anything else.

Re:The Internet is fine

[bunions]

there's no completely sound analogy. The bottom line is that the defendant was asked several times to not link it. Instead of being a decent human and saying "ok, it's your stuff, whatever" and not linking it, he chose to be a jerk about it.

Deep linking is still legal. Deep linking to something you've been asked not to by the rightful owner? Well, at least now there's legal precedent for what should be simple courtesy.

Re:The Internet is fine

[technothrasher]

Deep link all you want, this decision doesn't change anything. What it DOES change is that now I get to ask you not to, and you'll be fined if you don't comply. It's basically "don't be a jerk" codified into law. I fail to see the problem.

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 at the other guy to stop telling people this, but still gives just page 7 to anybody who asks!

Yelling at the guy is not the solution. Not giving people only page 7 is the solution.

Re:The Internet is fine

[bunions]

> Yelling at the guy is not the solution. Not giving people only page 7 is the solution.

I think we can all agree that the technical solution is the best one. However, if you ask the guy to stop telling everyone, he should.

Re:The Internet is fine

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

How does telling people where your house is constitute tresspass? A tresspass analogy, to be correct, would require that you have already opened your house for visitors and then sue someone for giving directions to the master bedroom.

Re:The Internet is fine

[Chandon Seldon]

You see... that's where you're wrong. If he wants to communicate the true and useful information that everything but page 7 is ads, you damn well don't have a right to legally stop him.

Re:The Internet is fine

[technothrasher]

I think we can all agree that the technical solution is the best one. However, if you ask the guy to stop telling everyone, he should.

So you think there should be laws against being a jerk? I think we'll have to agree to disagree there.

Re:The Internet is fine

[Dr. Zowie]

The problem is not that the defendant was sending customers to knock on the plaintiff's server. The problem is that the plaintiff's server was serving documents to those deadbeats. This is like handing out free food at the door to anyone who asks, and then complaining when the soup kitchen nearby starts sending people to your door. The solution is to stop feeding people you don't want to feed, not to sue someone for sending people your way.

Re:The Internet is fine

[bunions]

well, apparently you do, now.

I'm in favor of laws enforcing good behavior, which apparently put me at odds with the slashdot Rugged Individualist crowd. The law harms no one except shitheads.

Re:The Internet is fine

[jmatthew3]

that this is about deep linking is wrong. they're totally misunderstanding the issue.

people who say that you can stop all forms of deep linking are wrong. you cannot stop deep linking to, for example, a windows media streaming server.

I know this. I have worked on it from the perspective of the website trying to stop deep linkers (who are stealing) -- yes, in this case, they ARE stealing.

if you took all the images from websites you liked and put them on a webpage on your website, but still had your users load the images from the other websites, you'd be stealing their bandwidth. it's not what the web is about. that's not sharing information, that's taking someone else's shit and using it as your own.

now, imagine if you couldnt block access to .jpg files when the referrer isn't yoursite.com.

now, imagine your business is showing high-res images of weather forecasts or penguins.

now, imagine someone says, "hey, lets take all his shit, but let him pay for the bandwidth"

that sucks.

sure, you can come up with schemes to stop them, but if they try hard enough, they can get through. i'm talking about streaming media. it's much easier to stop image deep linking.

Re:The Internet is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Deep linking to something you've been asked not to by the rightful owner? Well, at least now there's legal precedent for what should be simple courtesy.

You write a book. I think the book is garbage so I write up a critique of it. My audience asks how they can verify my critique is authentic. So I tell them how to get a copy of your book. You respond by demanding that I stop telling people how to get a copy of your book. Should the court order me to stop telling people how to get a copy of your book? Should I even comply voluntarily? No!!! I have a constitutional right to speak out against your book. People are not going to believe my argument if they can not verify it themselves. If I don't tell people how to get a copy of the book they will assume I'm just making up the whole criticism.

This is just one example. There are a whole myriad of first amendment arguments around this issue. Putting a whole in the first amendment for this issue sets a very dangerous precedent which will likely be a slippery slope to further encroachments on freedom of speech.

I'm in favor of laws enforcing good behavior, which apparently put me at odds with the slashdot Rugged Individualist crowd. The law harms no one except shitheads.

I must note the irony of the last word in that paragraph. Anyway, who defines what constitutes good behavior? A society where everyone is compelled to have 'good behavior' is a society with no freedom. Such a society is one where any critic of the government will find themselves thrown in jail for failing to behave 'well'. By the account of some people in this country the sentence you wrote above should land you a two year prison sentence. Lucky for you we live in a society that tolerates individual expression.

Re:The Internet is fine

[paganizer]

I'm tempted to post anonymously, but...
the point I was trying to make is that the judge imposed a penalty against linking to materal, because it was copyrighted.
well, guess what. any web page I myself create has "copyright 2006, paganizer's alias"; If IRTFA correctly, that means I can sue someone for linking to anything I've ever created. as can any website writer. anything indexed by google can be penalized, unless specifically in the public domain.
and the standard, BTW, is not to embed. do not make it appear that someone else's stuff is an integral part of YOUR website.

Re:The Internet is fine

[ePhil_One]

the point I was trying to make is that the judge imposed a penalty against linking to materal, because it was copyrighted.

Your point omits key details. According to your interpretation, property laws mean people can't eat in restaurants anymore, because the proprieter has the right to ban unruly patrons.

If IRTFA correctly, that means I can sue someone for linking to anything I've ever created.

I haven't read the article to discover the details of this case, so I don't know if its based on copyright laws or not. And certainly if that content were at the root of a webpage, this wouldn't apply. And while you could certainly sue for almost anything, I would assume to be successful you would need a history of requests to "cease and dessist" that were ignored.

anything indexed by google can be penalized

You can specifically ask Google to not index your site and they will honor it. The usual method is via robots.txt, though if you wish you can ask to have your content removed from their index.

the standard, BTW, is not to embed

Which doesn't stop thousands of sites whose business model is to frame an existing site with ads they recieve money for. The internet if full of jerks doing things simply because they can.

Re:The Internet is fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly, they have the right to say "stop" and the way a website says stop is by not serving content to requests from elsewhere. Period.

Nonsense. I could say stop by hacking into their website and changing the link myself. I could gain control of the DNS records and point they website to localhost. I could physically attack the author Mafia style. And by your law of the jungle rules, thats all perfectly valid. I'd like to think we live in a civilized society where simple requests not to abuse a service I provide would be honored, instead of requiring complicated programing on my part to prevent you from doing so.

Re:The Internet is fine

[paganizer]

I don't think I expressed myself as clearly as I was hoping I did; I also fail at the analogy game, I used to try to do it, but frankly, it never worked for me.
So instead, i'll try this:
Before this, if i had 3 links on my site, A] pointing to an article which popped up in a new window, B] pointing to a video which popped up in a new window, and C] which caused a inline frame to display the video from B on the same page as my ads, then you could only hope to sue me with a reasonable chance of success for example C; I'm taking your stuff, denying you profit from ad revenue, while I'm enriching myself.
However, it would have been reasonable for the other webmaster to attempt to make use of web technology to prevent this from happening; blocking refer's from my website, or using more complex file obfuscation; only if that failed would you have, in my opinion, a real leg to stand on for going to court.
As to the other 2 examples, A is obviously standard practice; and for B, well, there is nothing saying the person didn't copy that link from another website; you might be able to get a judge to have you stop linking to it, but if you did it without trying a tech solution first, or maybe even just asking, well, then you would just be a jerk.

With the new decision, as I read it, the situation is this: all a person has to do is sue you. using your google example, you wouldn't have to make an entry in your robots.txt, you can sue!
No, not everyone would be such a jerk. But a hell of a lot of people would be; this opens the door to so many things its ridiculous. Think about the spammers; they send out 100 cease-and-desist orders to 100 different sites, with the knowledge that a small percentage of those people will ignore it, leaving the way open to a slam-dunk punitive judgement. The sites that DO comply have increased cost due to the neccesity of changing their sites everytime some idiot wants to screw with them.

I guess what we need is a registry of sane websites, that allow normal linking methods; if you aren't on the list, you don't get linked to by anybody who wants to avoid litigation....
There is a good business model somewhere in that for somebody with more time on their hands than I have.

Re:The Internet is fine

[Squirrelgirl]

I'm no law person, but isn't the fact that Google is not intended to presume to be the hosting/copyright owner of sites it links to, but instead a catalogue of information of where to go to find information, mean that google isn't as bad as this company was in this case?

It's one thing to make a "yellow pages" (i.e. Google) and another to make someone elses content appear to be your own?

Google doesn't presume to offer a range of services and have you call them so they'll send you a plumber. They just point to the plumber and inform you of it. They might accidentally make too much information about how to do something available so you could get things done without having to call the plumber, but there was no intent...?

Whereas the company in TA pretended they were the owner of the content, and also refused to cooperate with the legal owners?

A modest proposal

[presidenteloco]

If you don't want your material hyperlinked to, might I humbly suggest that you not put your material
on the worldwide web (web: (n) - a network of interlinked strands) and perhaps not render your material
in HYPERTEXT markup language (HTML) and perhaps not make it available with a HYPERTEXT TRANSPORT protocol
(HTTP) server.

Seriously, though: Putting your material on the web implies consent to have it linked to by any other site or
web browsing tool. This judge is ignorant of the nature and intent of the web, or is just a general dufus.

Re:A modest proposal

[Shados]

Yeah, definately. If a -hyperlink- ruins your business model when you use -hypertext-... The people complaining about this should just make their darn site in raw Flash or something. Problem solved >.>

The judge is an idiot, too. He/she seems to have no clue whatsoever about the implication of this decision.

The onus should be on the site wanting to block

[that this is not und]

It's not hard for a site to check the referrer tag (string?) and see where a browser was redirected from. Then it's simply a matter of that site refusing connections from browsers referred to it from sites they don't want linking to them.

It should be the content provider's responsibility to block unwanted connections, not the site pointing to the content.

Re:The onus should be on the site wanting to block

[Shados]

Agreed. This is amazingly retarded. Its a programmer's job to allow or deny this, not a court. Especialy since its not like you need a master degree in cryptography or something to protect content this way. Its 10 lines of code in an http module, or a htaccess, or whatever. It takes -minutes- to stop...

Here's a little clue for said judge

[symbolic]

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.

New Multi-Platform Spellchecker

[stryke3]

It's convenient, portable, and works with every browser. Find it here: http://www.amazon.com/Merriam-Websters-Collegiate- Dictionary-11th-Merriam-Webster/dp/0877798087

Re:New Multi-Platform Spellchecker

[AlHunt]

>It's convenient, portable, and works with every browser. Find it here: http://www.amazon.com/
>Merriam-Websters-Collegiate- Dictionary-11th-Merriam-Webster/dp/0877798087

I don't seem to have a drive bay large enough. Is there a wi-fi version?

Here's a link to one of their webcasts

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mfile.akamai.com/10735/wma/clearchan.downlo ad.akamai.com/10735/sx061209a.wma

Sit down kids and let me tell you a bed time story

[ryanisflyboy]

Let's say I am a store owner. Better yet, I am a movie theater owner and I show movies that I have made myself on the subject of squirrels. They are open to the public, anyone can just walk in and start enjoying the movies. To make money I have stuffed squirrels I sell in the lobby, and I have movie posters for another movie theater that shows horse movies. Now let us assume that my squirrel movies are the hottest thing in town. People can get enough of them. Everyone is talking about them. How cute their fluffy little tails are and all that cute squirrel crap. They are lining up down the street to see my free squirrel movies. And I am making a killing selling stuffed squirrels. Also, the horse theater is paying me gobs of money to put their posters on the wall. I am driving a car powered by squirrels I am doing so well.

Now let's say one of my biggest fans just loves my movies. He can't get enough of them, and he knows lost of other people who are the same. He would watch them all day long if he could but the line is just too long at the theater to get in. So, this fan happens to be a genius at optical systems. He rigs up a special series of prisms and mirrors to extend the 'broadcast' range of my movies. He figures "Hey, these are free so there is nothing wrong just extending the picture range, right? I am a big fan. The guy should be pleased about having such an amazing fan design a complex optical system just to watch his movies! He should feel really lucky to have me love his movies so much that I would go to the trouble." Now him and his friends can sit in a private theater next to mine and watch my movies in peace, just not in my theater.

One day I figure this out. I realize that there is no way I can stop his ingenious optical system from working. He is just too smart for me. I can't seem to figure out how all those new-fangled prisms and mirrors work. Worse, I am angry. His little private showing room doesn't have the horse posters and stuffed squirrels. Turns out that my customers don't really like that stuff, but they just tolerate it to get at my squirrel movies. The second they hear this guy is showing my movies in another place without the stupid horse posters they all go to his private viewing room. Sales are down 40% at my theater. The horse theater owner is mad cause his posters aren't being viewed and refuses to pay me any more money. Worse, the squirrels in my card die cause I can no longer afford to feed them. Now remember, the movie picture actually originates from my theater, yet it lands on a screen in his private theater as well as mine.

So I sue the kid. The judge says, yup - this guy is stealing your movies. He isn't supposed to be doing that. He will have to remove all the new-fangled prisms that get the picture to magically show up in his private theater. Also, he is going to have to pay you back for all those lost sales that he caused by doing this.

This leaves the slashdot crowd so confused, I have to write a dumb post about squirrel movies to explain it.

Don't Mess with Texas!

[stox]

It's not nice to pick on mentally handicapped.

OB it-won't-work-because (x) post

[davidwr]

This judges ruling affirms a

( ) technical (x) legal ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting deep-linking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.

(One or more of the following may apply to your particular ruling, and it may
have other flaws which may to vary from state until the appealate courts rule
on the matter)

(x) Without deep linking the Internet is broken
(x) Deep linking is tradition since 1990
(x) The web's original designers encouraged deep-linking
(x) Other courts have upheld the legality of deep linking
(x) Other countries allow deep linking
(x) Technical means which are legal overseas can simulate deep-linking
(x) This ruling makes you look ignorant of technology
(x) The plaintiff's teenaged daughter probably deep-links MP3 files
(x) If the plaintiff wants deep-linking, technical tricks can make it difficult
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) The appealate courts will not put up with it
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(x) Ad-blocking proxies in foreign countries
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Technically illiterate judges

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) deep-linking sucks
(x) not deep-linking sucks
(x) We should be able to watch races without seeing ads
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you, Mr. Plaintiff:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a technically illiterate person for suggesting it.

[modified from LiquidCooled's April 22, 2006 reply re: spam-filtering]

Deep linking to files or to pages, though?

[aduthie]

It's not completely clear, but it sounds like the deep links were going straight to media files, such as WMV or MOV format. I can see how the file owner could loses advertising revenue from that sort of link. But what if they linked to the HTML page that includes the link to the media file?

For comparison, this would be like linking to a video file on YouTube vs. linking to YouTube's page for that same video. If the former is deemed harmful to the owner but the latter is deemed mutually beneficial, that would seem reasonable to me.

In a lot of ways, this reminds me of the much earlier cases where content owners complained about being displayed inside someone else frameset rather than in a separate window. In that case, the user could get the impression that the content belonged to the linking site, rather than to the site actually hosting it.

Re:Wow

[PeterHammer]

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.

Note: this is NOT a final ruling

[bugnuts]

From TFA: U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in the northern district of Texas granted a preliminary injunction...

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. It would do little good for an injunction to get tied up in court for long periods of time, since big companies could simply drag it out, milking the plaintiff all the while. Preliminary injunctions are done to halt the alleged injurious action and give time to evaluate it.

It'll generally go to court for a full hearing to determine if the order should be made permanent.

Re:Wow

[ScentCone]

One can argue that the patent and copyright systems are all about the government securing profit for businesses and individuals.

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.

I don't think the law says what you think it says

[argent]

If this is indeed illegal, they shouldn't have to do things like that.

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 from the gardon back to the house before I grew enough to climb over the fence when the gate was locked.

How the hell is this case any different?

Its kind of like a store owner who doesn't properly secure his shop at night.

If you leave the door open and the lights on, and the store unattended, you can actually get in trouble yourself for operating an "attractive nuisance".

Analogies are great; everyone should have one

[jevvim]

Since we're playing the analogy game, let's go for mine:

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:Analogies are great; everyone should have one

[n00854180t]

Good analogy, but it still doesn't change the fact that it would be the domain of the content owner, not the government, to make sure their customers see their ads, and that "guides" (deep links) may not be used. In your analogy, the judge should say "Change the maze then, it isn't the government's problem that your customers don't want to look at your ads." The actual ruling (in the context of your analogy) is that conveying the information to bypass the ads to anyone is the same as depriving the content owner of revenue(which everyone can agree is absurd in the extreme, and otherwise in which case every company and individual on the planet would owe every other company and individual on the planet an absurd sum of money for compensation, since any number of events would qualify as deprivation of revenue). This concept is patently false, since the person relaying information about the direction of the maze has in fact done nothing but reproduce information made publicly available (and in context of the actual case, this would be the URL, not the actual song file, which everyone knows is illegal to reproduce). The next step from this ruling is to make thinking of copyrighted content the same as deprivation of revenue, and to start charging everyone uniform profit recovery fees of arbitrary sums.

Re:Analogies are great; everyone should have one

[7macaw]

No, a deep link is someone blindfolding you and leading through the maze to the picture.

Re:Analogies are great; everyone should have one

[nacturation]

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. Pfft... a deep link is more like taking a Sherman tank and mowing down all of the maze walls until you directly reach the destination, laughing maniacally as you crush any innocent bystanders under your blood-encrusted steel tracks.

Re:Analogies are great; everyone should have one

[FLEB]

Please, be my lawyer.

Re:Analogies are great; everyone should have one

[RingDev]

but what if your map maker is either charging $5 for each map, or his maps have his own advertisements on it?

-Rick

This isn't such a big deal.

[belmolis]

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.

Ruling in a related case in Texas

[andy314159pi]

In a related case from Texas, a judge ruled not against deep linking, but against deep thinking.

Re:Ruling in a related case in Texas

[Anonymous Coward]

lol good one

It's workable

[goombah99]

It's entirely possible for someone to create an active pages site that inhibits deep linking. The judge is just saying that just because the site does not actively prohibit deep links that you are entirled to deep link. You can of course do so, but if you are asked to stop then you are supposed to stop.

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 sign saying please do not trespass but not take active measures to stop you.

The judge did not say that you cannnot deep link. Just that if there are reasonable indications like the no tresspassing sign you should not do so.

Since we already have robots.txt protocols there's already a mechanism to automate this for web spiders.

Re:Sit down kids and let me tell you a bed time st

[Dunbal]

This leaves the slashdot crowd so confused, I have to write a dumb post about squirrel movies to explain it.

      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 product or not, so long as the odd one clicks and gets you some revenue? And you expected to finance your bandwidth this way? Flawed business model... come back when you grow up a bit.

      It's like the guy who complains that no one bought his tickets to the baseball game - the one that was held in the public park, with no fence around it or anything. Sure, arrest all those "thieves" who are watching the game for free - how dare they?

I require a car analogy

[heinousjay]

A better analogy would be like if you were driving in this super-hot tricked out Skyline with extra stickers, a big-ass wing, and a full tank of blinker fluid, and you sued the government because some yuppie jerkoff beat you off the line in a Volkswagen Jetta.

Sorry to get technical

[DavidShor]

The idea is related to mathematical proof by contradiction, Suppose proposition X was true, then proposition X implies proposition W is true, but, it also implies proposition Y is true, But Y is incorrect by previous knowledge. so we deduce that Y is both correct and incorrect at the same time, and P and not P is axiomatically false. Therefore, our assumption (that X was true) is incorrect. Lets plug stuff in, X="Content providers Should have complete control over how their customers are introduced to their material" W="this Judges ruling was correct" Y="People should not be allowed to talk freely about websites at parties" X implies W and Y, but Y is false, so (W and Y) is false, so X cannot be true, and true implies false is false.

Re:Sorry to get technical

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and King Lear said that all men are liars, but King Lear was a man, therefore he was lying, but if he was lying, then what he said is true, but if it's true it's a lie, ad inifitum. Interesting, but doesn't really get us anywhere is this case.

Re:Sorry to get technical

[Anonymous Coward]

that was a great post. thanks. I would mod you up if I wasn't an AC.

Re:Sorry to get technical

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

How does X imply Y?

I think you're using the word 'introduce' ambiguously and using one meaning to derive X->W and one to derive X->Y.

Re:Sorry to get technical

[DavidShor]

Hmm, almost, but the opposite of "all men are liars" is "not all men are liars", which is not the same as "all men tell the truth",

So, suppose King Lear's statement X="All men are liars" is true, as you pointed out, then because King Lear is a man, X is false. So X is false and true at the same time. Therefore, our assumption is incorrect, and X is false, so, "Not all men are liars"

The statement that breaks the system is "I am lying", there is no way to determine the validity of that statement. But it was proven in the 20's that there are always a couple propositions that cannot be accessed as true or false in any consistent logical system.

Re:Sit down kids and let me tell you a bed time st

[Dunbal]

Sorry to reply twice - something I forgot.

      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.

window shopping

[slothman32]

Let's say you are window shopping.
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.

Happy hollidays scenty!

[crabpeople]

"and eventually hire an electrician to help you?"

Come come now, I dont think you really need the help of an electrician to flip a circut breaker...

Re:Happy hollidays scenty!

[ScentCone]

Come come now, I dont think you really need the help of an electrician to flip a circut breaker...

Yeah, and not everyone needs to hire a server admin or engage a consultant to make sure that fundamentally changing the way your web site works won't have any unpleasant consequences, either. And some people do.

Re:Happy hollidays scenty!

[ScentCone]

Oh, and Merry Christmas. Happy Solstice, etc.!

Simple solution

[jolyonr]

There's a simple solution for this (commonly used).

Allow the file to link if the referer is from your site OR is blank.

That way, Mr Deep Linker will find 99% of his audience will not be able to link to your content, because they won't be blocking referers. Of course, he could suggest people do that - and it entirely depends on the audience and the content as to whether they would bother. But it makes the deep linking less than elegant for them to do and more obvious to visitors that they're trying to access something they shouldn't be.

Jolyon

Re:Simple solution

[DavidTC]

A better solution would be if web browsers, and anonymizing proxies, would only strip out other server referers. I.e., when you go from slashdot.org to example.com, sure, block that one referer. When you're moving around within example.com, don't.

It's really pointless to block referers within a single site. Unless you're going through something like Tor, where each request comes from different IPs, there's nothing that can't be trivially learned from the server logs anyway.

Sadly, I've never seen the option to just block 'foreign' referers.

Of course, if you've blocking pages based on referer, instead of other content, you need to let in the blank referer anyway. Because, duh, that is probably a bookmark.

And the real WTF is...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the real WTF is... they were such a giant case of 'more money than sense' stupidity that they opted for legal action instead of just redirecting all HTTP queries containing a Referer string of "http://offendingsite.com/.*" to "http://stupidsite.com/index.html"

this is a relief...

[Anonymous Coward]

i initially thought the judge had ruled against deep-throating. thankfully my spare time is still safe

Haven't RTFA

[creysoft]

I just want to combat some misinformation I've been seeing.

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 (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

Re:Wow

[PeterHammer]

Agreed. And in a perfect world we would only have non-profit people and organizations. Sadly, they are not the ones funding the lobbying efforts which gave us such abberations as the DMCA, gene patents and my personal favorite: the wheel patent.

There is even an argument to say that copyrights held by non-profits are a by-product, or even an abuse, of copyright laws put in place to protect personal and corporate profits.

Chicago Cubs

[Kelson]

A better analogy might be an artist puts their painting in a gallery window, and you open a shop across the street and put in a telescope so people can see the orignal painting

This reminds me of a case in 2002, in which the Chicago Cubs sued businesses 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.

Re:Chicago Cubs

[pipingguy]

Why didn't the Cubs just float a few dozen large balloons with obstruction devices hanging from them during games?

Re:Chicago Cubs

[Galvatron]

Why didn't the Cubs just float a few dozen large balloons with obstruction devices hanging from them during games?

Because suing the owners of the buildings just gets the owners of the buildings pissed at you. Obstructing the view of the fans who are watching from the roofs of those buildings gets the FANS pissed at you. A team like the Cubs that haven't won a World Series since before the first World War would be nothing without a VERY sympathetic fanbase.

And, of course, settling out of court makes sense for everyone. The owners of the buildings no doubt agreed to pay a hefty annual fee, in exchange for a contract guaranteeing that the Cubs will never renovate the stadium in such a manner as to block out their views. Everyone wins.

Re:Chicago Cubs

[pipingguy]

A team like the Cubs that haven't won a World Series since before the first World War would be nothing without a VERY sympathetic fanbase.

I wouldn't know much about that phenomenon, I used to live in Montreal.

Linking to CRM has been illegal for a LONG TIME!

[kokojie]

Look at the number of P2P indexing websites that has been taken down, they had absolutely no copy-righted material on their site, but had links to them.

Bollocks. You can't copyright a link.

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole "Wow." subthread is ill-founded, as half the people are talking about copyright, but the only thing that the referer possessed was a link, and you can't hold copyright on a link.

Score: -1 Bollocks

Unconstitutional

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

To those of us who understand the WWW, this ruling clearly runs contrary to the right of free speech that is guaranteed by the 1st Amendment. I'm confident that eventually, the courts will see it that way, but I wonder how long that might take.

The lesson here is..

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't center around a motorcross website! Center on a motorcross site, or have information about motorcross, but when you center around something, you're just setting yourself up to get ruled against in Texas. They respect the English language in Texas, and when you mess with the language, you mess with Texas.

Why all the fuss?

[DarkProphet]

I don't really see this as all that big of a deal. This DOES NOT 'make the whole internet illegal', as some of the more melodramatic slashdotters seem to think. I mean really, if a copyright holder contacts me and asks me to remove a link (to their content) on my website, I'll just take it down. No reason for the other party to sue. They'd have a right to sue if I refused, and that's all this case really proves. I would question the motives of anyone who WOULD refuse to remove such a link. Sounds to me like some jerk refused because "they can't make me", and the court proved him wrong. OTOH, if I was automatically slapped with a lawsuit without so much as a request to remove the offending link... well thats something different. I'd contact the copyright holder and let them know that I am willing to remove the link, and I would appreciate it if they would drop the lawsuit. If they refused, I would still remove the link, and I'd countersue for harrassment, or something along those lines. The result: at worst they lose the case and are forced to pay court costs. IANAL, but common sense tells me this is how such cases will pan out.

Re:Why all the fuss?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linking to copyrighted material is like saying, "Hey, go check out that copyrighted material that's on the copyright owner's site." You think that someone should be sued over that? That's crap.

Re:Why all the fuss?

[DarkProphet]

Not exactly. What I mean is that I think a person could reasonably expect to be sued if the copyright owner asked for the link to be removed and the person refused. Especially so if the link content is video or audio -- thats costing somebody some bandwidth without the benefit of the ad-impressions, which are likely intended to cover that cost. The 'guilty' parties shouldn't be sued for copyright infringement, they should be sued for theft-of-service. They should be sued for copyright infringement only if they save a local copy of the content and publish it on their website. I have no idea if that is actually how it would go down in the courtroom, though.

I hope this clears things up.

Re:Wow

[n00854180t]

That may be their current function, but it is not their proscribed function. In the case of patents, the idea (was, but somewhat no longer) to ensure the IMPLEMENTATION of an idea is protected for the owner of that IMPLEMENTATION. Eventually the patent system was corrupted to its present condition, in which IDEAS are patentable (i.e., the "idea" of vacuum (absense of energy or matter) is technically patentable, which does not fit the framework of the original intention of the patent system). Copyright was similarly meant to ensure that the copyright holder was fairly compensated UNTIL which point the material enters the public domain (IIRC, the original time frame was 10-15 years). The copyright system has been destroyed by large companies that are outside the scope of the original intention of the copyright system (which arises partially from the idiotic rulings recognizing corporations as individuals and citizens). It would be the government's role to enforce those patent and copyright laws, but DEFINITELY not to enforce profits for a sole individual or corporation, which is what this and other rulings are about (although this particular one is even MORE absurd, since the judge's ruling is essentially saying that an owner of any content made public should be guaranteed, by the government, any amount of profit they wish from said public content, regardless of their negligence in assuring that profit will be made or not). So no, neither of those systems are in place to force the government to ensure profits for any individual or corporation.

Re:Wow

[n00854180t]

The wheel patent is an excellent example of what patents were NEVER intended to do. Whoever was issued this patent most assuredly cannot disprove any and all prior art of the wheel, making the patent absurd, as is all patents on ideas instead of implementations of ideas.

Re:Wow

[Sparr0]

One would be wrong. The purpose of the patent and copyright system is only superficially to reward the rights holders. The purpose of the rewards is to encourage more people to produce inventions and creative works, and the purpose of the encouragement is so that there will be more inventions and creative works for the public to have access to.

It is a bit of a trick

[DavidShor]

X does imply Y, if "Content creators should have total control over how users are introduced to their material" is true, and then Users should not be able to talk about content at parties in an uncontrolled manner, which contradicts Y.

It does not condemn the judgment; all it does is suggesting X is not true. Notice that X is a very strongly worded statement.

I was just clarifying the logical foundation for arguments such as these, as you expressed that you did not understand them. But judging by your username (If you don't mind my asking, what is so special about that number?), you probably know this far better than me; I'm just a 15 year old math major at a shitty Florida college.

Re:It is a bit of a trick

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I'm not sure exactly what 'introduce' means here. It could mean 'first find out about' (as in X first hears about Y at a party) or it could mean 'first access' (as in the first thing you see on a web site). There seems to me to be a sharp distinction between these two meanings of 'introduce' and I can't imagine a judge having any kind of difficulty distinguishing them either. Your logic is fine, but the statements you're applying it to are problematic.

(exp(pi*sqrt(163)) is astonishingly close to an integer. It's not a coincidence, ie. there's a reason why, but it's pretty deep.)

Re:It is a bit of a trick

[DavidShor]

That is a good point. But I think that would only be valid if they hot linked the content to be viewable from the website. In this case, the defendent posting a link on a website saying "Hey check this link out to just see the motocross video", and that seems to be equivalent to telling a friend "if you just type in /vid, then you can skip all the ads" at a nerdy party.

To the spelling Nazies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, one of you point out the errors, to the rest: pipe the hell down you karma whores. It only takes one person to point spelling/grammar errors out. If you have nothing else to say STFU or get your brains working on a retort and stop waisting space on these forums. Personally I want a discussion, not 5 replies stating that the parent can't spell or doesn't know exact grammar. Get off your high horses, come up with an intelligent reply or stay in school since your critical thinking isn't nearly as developed as it should be. Nnitght kiddies.

Re:To the spelling Nazies...

[bky1701]

http://www.google.com/ #1 spell-checking app online.

idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

SFX will lose its ability to sell sponsorships or advertisement on the basis that it is the exclusive source of the Webcasts, and such loss will cause irreparable harm.

the judge hasn't heard of adblock.

while direct linking to the content may harm the original site in some cases, calling it copyright infringement is stupid. call it something else; like "circumventing business tactics" or something. and if that is the case than all ad-blocking software is ruled illegal.

Re:Sit down kids and let me tell you a bed time st

[chuhwi]

Uhh, no, that would be copyright infringement. It's more like you are showing ads before your squirrel movie and someone publishes at what time the actual movie starts. Do you think that should be illegal?

that's not a better analogy

[commodoresloat]

since in your analogy the viewer is in your store using invasive technology to view something in another store. A link to content is an actual visit to the complaining site. A better analogy is if I read a good article in a magazine and told you what page of the magazine to find the article on. This would allow you to pick up the magazine and (horror of horrors!) read the article directly without flipping through the advertisements. The person reading it has to actually pick up the magazine, but they are being linked directly to the content rather than having to find it using the publisher's navigational system. I can't see any reason why this should be illegal other than that the party who should have won the case made a crappy argument in their defense.

Re:that's not a better analogy

[profplump]

Except magazines ads are sold based on circulation numbers not actual ad impressions, so there's no lost revenue. Internet ads are generally only counted by actual image-loaded impressions, not the total number of site visitors. But you're right, the concept is similar.

Re:that's not a better analogy

[dangitman]

Except magazines ads are sold based on circulation numbers not actual ad impressions, so there's no lost revenue.

There is if companies stop advertising, because they feel the ads are ineffective because people aren't looking at them.

Re:that's not a better analogy

[veganboyjosh]

am i the only one who's frustrated lately by many magazine's purposeful lack of page numbers?

Re:that's not a better analogy

[ari wins]

Your analogy, while almost true, misses one crucial point. Magazines get paid for printing ads, whereas on the web, people have to actually look at them. If I point out the interview in this month's Playboy, and my friend flips directly to that page, Playboy loses nothing in the way of profits.

Re:that's not a better analogy

[commodoresloat]

Sounds like a problem with someone's business model, not a copyright issue or a problem for the law to intervene in. That was my point.

Not too surprising

[Brandybuck]

I'm not too surprised by this decision. The FSF has been arguing strenously for a couple decades that linking consitutes derivation. It's a different kind of linking, to be sure, but the analogy is very apt. In both cases there is no copying, modification or distribution of copyrighted material, only a reference to copyrighted materials. See http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366 for an expert's take on the issue.

Perhaps the judge has read too much of Stallman?

not in America

[commodoresloat]

One can argue that the patent and copyright systems are all about the government securing profit for businesses and individuals.

In the US Constitution, the purpose of copyright is to promote the creation of more work. It has nothing to do with profit, and the Supreme Court explicitly affirmed this point in Feist v. Rural Telephone Services (a case where the Court unanimously held that copyright does not protect a company's right to profit from the work they did in compiling a telephone directory). So, no, it's not about securing profit, at least according to U.S. law (obviously it has been used that way by unscrupulous cartels, but that is a different point).

Boo-urns

[Cervantes]

Regardless of what a poor showing the defendant made, this is still one of those cases that demonstrates how basing an entire system of justice on "prior law" is a bad idea... because now, and until it's overturned, this piece of crap is there as a reference for every scumbag lawyer who wants to make a few bucks.

Here's an idea... let's all pool our money, and we'll put up big billboards in every city, and those billboards will say "IT'S THE INTERNET, YOU FUCKWAD, IT'S ALL PUBLIC, ALL THE TIME. IF YOU DON'T WANT IT PUBLIC, DON'T PUT IT UP"
I think that's pretty much to the point, without using too many bad words.

Seriously, if you want to control access to a page, you make people login to see it, even if it's free to log in. If you put it up where everyone can get to it, then don't be surprised that they DO JUST THAT. And since when is adver-fucking-tising revenue a god-given right? What's up with that? What, you have a huge page of banners at the start of your site, and you're hoping people will just click them blindly? Are you too dumb to put your adverts on the same page as your content? Do you need donations to pay for the doctor to help pull your head out of your ass?

We need to put a stop to thinking like this, before the fuckwads take over teh intarwebs. It's all doomed otherwise. You young-uns may not remember this, but at one time the internet was FREE. Like speech, not beer. If it was there, it was there for everyone. If it was offensive, you just went somewhere else or closed your window. One of the most popular sites in the mid-90's was 'titties and beer'. Do you hear me? TITTIES AND BEER. It was a long, poorly formatted page, filled with nothing but pictures of titties and pictures of beer. Fuck, I remember Yahoo indexing porn. And REVIEWING the porn. Even the SICK porn. I'm not kidding. Yahoo used to have a short blurb on most of the sites in their index, and they'd review every link they had, sick or not. "Farmlove.com is a large site with many pictures of unattractive women and comparatively attractive farm animals. Not for the weak of heart, or PETA. But if you like this sort of thing, I guess this is the place for you".

Now what do we have? "Well, sure, you put this stuff up on TEH INTARWEBS, but you're not making enough money off of it, so I'll agree that deep linking is illegal". FUCK.

Dear Santa:
All I want for Wintereenmas is for Google to pull the fucktards from their index and never let them back in.
Sincerely,
Cervy

To all those webmasters "Deep Linking"

[gmby]

GET YOUR OWN CONTENT; IDIOT!

Go ahead; mod me Flamebait... but you know I'm right.

Try this with non-web addresses

[djshaffer]

Assume that a company has a Yellow Pages (TM) advertisement, that also includes an advertisement for Sony televisions. Further assume that Sony pays them for the extra plug.

Can they sue to prevent other companies from publishing their address and phone number, rather than directing people to the YP advertisement?

And, off topic, can't Slashdot proofread their articles? Try this: He cited the site of the website. Due to the high resolution background, it was quite a sight.

Slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just surprised that Slashdot wasn't the first site to get sued!

Re:Sit down kids and let me tell you a bed time st

[micpp]

That's not a very good analogy. A better one would be if you were trying to sue someone for publishing the location of your cinema. Which is of course ridiculous.

spam analogy is bunk

[commodoresloat]

This isn't like spamming at all. It's about a server explicitly configured to serve pages, and instead of configuring it otherwise (or taking down the pages), the owner of the server is taking someone to court for pointing at something on the page. It's not about figuring out "technical tricks to block such practices" -- if you don't want your page linked, don't put it out on http! The whole point of HTTP is allowing hypertext to be transported from one place to another.

Re:spam analogy is bunk

[ePhil_One]

This isn't like spamming at all

The Original poster claimed that because technical tricks existed to stop the behavior, that it was therefore OK to engage in that behavior. I presented an analogy to another (very specific, spamming via open relays) behavior that technical tricks existed to stop, spam. I could have suggested Botnets instead, because certainly the technology exists to prevent your computer from becoming a slave. I'm sure there are plenty of others analogies that could be made. The analogy was very relevant.

The point of which is the arguement made, that the behavior is OK because it can be blocked, is foolish

The whole point of HTTP is allowing hypertext to be transported from one place to another.

Thanks for the laugh.

Re:spam analogy is bunk

[commodoresloat]

It is not a "technical trick" offered as a way to "stop the behavior"; it's something built into the very software. If you don't like what the protocol does, don't use it. If you're going to use it, read the manual. The point is, the "behavior" in question is simply linking, the very purpose of the Web. I realize you think my HTTP comment was a joke, but you appear to have missed the point again -- if you don't want your document to be available to people using HTTP, don't make it available via HTTP. Making it available and then suing someone for linking to it is just moronic.

jUDGE RULES AGAINST WEB

[dindi]

This is the basic idea of the web, what should I say. Given company should be happy for free links, if it is a feed, then they should just deny the client or not have a link.

"Judge Ruling" does not equal "Legislation"

[mooboy]

If this were a new law being passed that prohibits linking to copyrighted content I would have a problem with it - laws shouldn't try to solve problems when technical solutions are already working. But this is an interpretation of existing law, and I can kind-of see the wisdom of the ruling. A copyright holder ought to be able to control the way in which his/her work is distributed. But it is cost prohibitive to use the courts to solve copyright problems. Wouldn't it be easier to put some energy into the website to prevent anyone from deep-linking? And does this open up a can of worms for copyright owners to retroactively sue for compensation?

This is a preliminary injunction only

[Katharine]

Before people get too riled, note that this decision was on a preliminary injunction. That means that the judge has NOT decided that deep-linking is illegal. He has only found that the plaintiff, SFX Motor Sports, has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of the case, harm to SFX Motor Sports that cannot adequately remedied with money, and that less harm will be done to the defendant if the injunction were issued than to plaintiff if it were not. And so the judge has issued the injunction.

At this point, the case will go forward on the merits. So all of you who are crying that the EFF should get involved should get busy and set up a Robert Davis defense fund and try to connect him up with the EFF. Because there is still a chance to convince the judge that deep linking is not copyright infringement.

this is excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Without deep linking, authors will have to generate their own original content.

Re:Wow

[bky1701]

"There is even an argument to say that copyrights held by non-profits are a by-product, or even an abuse, of copyright laws put in place to protect personal and corporate profits."

That was never the goal of copyright. Copyright existed to improve the scientific and cultural value of the human race, it was made to give motive to create content. It was never intended to "protect" anyone's gains, that was just the means meant to attain it's goal. Clearly, though, the idea was flawed and has been perverted so badly no one can even remember why it existed in the first place.

The logical next step.

[cwsulliv]

Using the logic accepted by the judge in this case, the next step would be a decision that referencing the actual page number of an article in a magazine or newspaper deprives the publication of the additional advertising revenue they could expect if the reader had to search for it in the issue.

Re:Wow

[n00854180t]

I was bored nearing the end of work.

Maybe they should fire thier admin.

[Mantus]

Any situation like this is 100% the admins fault. It is very easy to block the hotlinking of content like this. These asshats clogged up the justice system so they could run a site w/o a full time admin or so their incompetent admin could pretend he was worth more than the $5.15/hr that he should be making.

It means Slashdot is f----'d...

[thekm]

Slashdot links to stuff all over the place, and certainly not via a site's homepage... so they're costing other companies ad revenue too (all them expensive ads put on the home page).


...so, /. is gonna feel the burn of this pretty soon! :)



(they get the argument however: we drove more traffic to your site than you can generate yourself. so much so we crached your ass!)

What are you panicing about?

[msobkow]

The site, run by a Robert Davis, provided links directly to live feeds of 'Supercross' events streaming from the SFX Motor Sports site.

In other words, the ruling was over streaming media, not static or dynamic page content. There were earlier rulings on the same type of issue for static and dynamic page content.

People forget there are expenses for the ISP to upload the content that users download. I worry more about whether there is any double-dip billing going on for the data transfers.

I thought cases were decided on what the LAW is.

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's no law against him linking to content, then regardless of how stupidly he argued his case in court, he should still have won the lawsuit. The judge can't simply ignore the law!

I summon BadAnalogyGuy

[kennygraham]

Where is he when you need him?

Re:I summon BadAnalogyGuy

[WilliamSChips]

He's the Doctor, this thread is Earth not progressing to the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire.

Re:I thought cases were decided on what the LAW is

[Anonymous Coward]

The judge can't simply ignore the law!

Au contraire. Judges do it all the time. The only thing (besides their conscience) preventing them from ignoring the law is one of the parties bringing up what the appropriate law is. Then that party is eligible to appeal the judge's ruling should the judge choose to ignore the law. If neither party brings up the law, the judge is free to do whatever.

Basically, you need a lot of money to pay for people with experience, training, and good acumen at branch prediction to defend or prosecute your case. It takes a whole lot of logical pressure to get a judge to rule in your favor if they are not so inclined by their own biases. Be especially careful when suing any government entity. Today's judges, at least those on the Federal courts, are generally more conservative that they have been in the past and so tend to say government corruption is okay so long as it serves the government to be corrupt. The modern conservative movement is interesting that way -- it seems to want to make the government look bad by allowing the government to be bad.

Motocross ...

[Anonymous Coward]

That should read motocross, not motorcross.

Print this!

[smitty97]

Dear Editor:

Please post the "Print" link instead of the referenced url, I do not want to see/load news.com ads.

Bogus -- Here's Why

[jmatthew3]

Brief Response: If someone's deep linking to something like streaming media, it's much, much different than deep linking to, say, an article within a website.

Deep linking to streaming media is like using the image off someone else's webserver on your own website. It uses their bandwidth for your gain. It's not what the web is about. I have friends who run a site and have similar issues -- they combat deep linkers to their content. Basically, with on-demand videos on something like, say, real server or windows media server, you send a file to the player that says something like:

10: Play advertisement #1 at url rtsp://a.b.com/ad1.ext (also, banner/box ads for advertisement #1 will display on the page)
20: Play video at url rtsp://a.b.com/video.ext
30: Play advertisement #2 at url rtsp://a.b.com/ad2.ext (also, banner/box ads for advertisement #2 will display on the page)

sometimes, there will be countermeasures to make sure that the file downloaded by the player is "fresh" (some type of basic salted hash scheme) -- but even this isn't unbreakable. it's very breakable by motivated people.

basically, windows media server (very popular) doesn't support strong authentication / encryption. therefore, you have to get very creative in preventing deep linking to your content.

deep linking to an article? that's what it's all about. embedding someone else's content in your site? that's just wrong.

I'm not sure if this directly applies to the instant case, but it should be taken into account, definitely.

i didn't RTFA.

Re:I thought cases were decided on what the LAW is

[nick_davison]

If there's no law against him linking to content, then regardless of how stupidly he argued his case in court, he should still have won the lawsuit. The judge can't simply ignore the law!

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.

RETARDS IN CHARGE OF TECHNOLOGY

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when retards are in charge of technology.

One retarded judge is more dangerous than than a fucking stupid.. nevermind.

Enjoy what's left before it's all gone. The media won't help you and the people don't KNOW what is going on. It will all be gone pretty soon.

"Like a book"

[Myria]

This is exactly why most software EULAs no longer say that you must treat the software like a book, which was once very common. The IP lawyers realized that the draconian things prohibited by a EULA are allowed with a book and have been since antiquity. This is, of course, legally absurd because copyright law doesn't distinguish between electronic and tangible works other than some minor issues.

With a book copyrighted by someone else, you have the right to tell someone to look directly at a word on page 122 (linking). You also have the right to look at a page of the book under a microscope (reverse engineering). And obviously you have the right to critique the quality of the book (performance testing). Yet many EULAs prohibit exactly these things.

If the argument were that the website isn't just copyrighted but is also private property, it still should be legal, in the same sense that you don't need Disney's permission to say where Club 33 is located.

This judge is clearly incompetent, and hopefully the judges along the appeal path aren't as much so.

Melissa

Re:"Like a book"

[cwsulliv]

"This judge is clearly incompetent, and hopefully the judges along the appeal path aren't as much so."

There probably won't be an appeal unless some interested organization picks up the tab. According to the article the defendant represented himself without an attorney, and from the sound of it didn't present a very competent argument. There may or may not be any basis for an appeal.

IANAL but my understanding is that a district judge's ruling applies only in his own district. If so, a similar case argued by a competant defense attorney in another district will hopefully lead to a different outcome.

So you can't tell anyone where anything is!

[tygt]

So would it not similarly be illegal to say "you can find a picture of this in the National Geographic magazine, November 2005 issue, on page 131..."?

That's equivalent to a link.

Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

What will this mean for Google?

For what it's worth, I'm of the opinion that for non-commercial uses, deep-linking and other things should be perfectly allowable. For money-making operations, no.

Here is the Court's Opinion in this case

[kaltkalt]

As follows is the court's opinion in this case, cut and pasted from a .PDF file off of the Federal Court's PACER website (not free, we lawyers pay for it). I don't know how to upload a .PDF file to Slashdot, so this is the best I could do. 1Defendant Robert Davis is a pro se litigant. He did not file responses to Plaintiff's Mot. for Prelim. Inj. or Plaintiff's Motion for Partial Summary Judgment; however, he did file his Mot. to Quash within the deadline permitted for responses to both of those motions. The court, therefore, treats Davis's Mot. to Quash and the arguments contained therein as his response, as well as a motion seeking affirmative relief. Memorandum Opinion and Order - Page 1 IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT NORTHERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS DALLAS DIVISION LIVE NATION MOTOR SPORTS, INC. f/k/a SFX MOTOR SPORTS, INC., Plaintiff, v. Civil Action No. 3:06-CV-276-L ROBERT DAVIS, d/b/a TRIPLECLAMPS and www.supercrosslive.com, Defendant. MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER Before the court are several pending motions, including: Plaintiff's Motion for Preliminary Injunction ("Plaintiff's Mot. for Prelim. Inj."), filed June 23, 2006; Defendants and Counter Claimant's Motion to Quash Plaintiff's Motion for Partial Summary Judgment and to Quash Plaintiff's Motion for Preliminary Injunction and to Quash Plaintiff's Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law in Support of Motion for Preliminary Injunction ("Mot. to Quash")1, filed July 12, 2006; Defendants [sic] and Counter Claimant's Motion for Preliminary Injunction ("Defendant's Mot. for Prelim. Inj."), filed August 2, 2006; and Plaintiff's First Supplement to Plaintiff's Motion for Preliminary Injunction ("Plaintiff's Suppl. Mot. for Prelim. Inj."), filed October 24, 2006. After careful consideration of the motions, related briefs and applicable law, the court grants Plaintiff's Motion for Preliminary Injunction; denies in part Defendant's Motion to Quash; denies Defendant 2Plaintiff filed a notice with the court on November 6, 2006, that it had changed its name from SFX Motor Sports, Inc. to Live Nation Motor Sports, Inc. Since all of the motions, responses and accompanying briefs addressed by this motion were filed prior to the name change, this order will refer to Plaintiff as "SFX" for consistency and clarity. Memorandum Opinion and Order - Page 2 and Counter Claimant's Motion for Preliminary Injunction; and denies as moot Plaintiff's First Supplement to Plaintiff's Motion for Preliminary Injunction. I. BACKGROUND This is a trademark, copyright and unfair competition action filed by Plaintiff SFX Motor Sports, Inc. ("SFX")2, on Feb. 13, 2006, against Defendant Robert Davis, d/b/a TripleClamps and www.supercrosslive.com ("Davis"). Davis filed counterclaims against SFX alleging trademark infringement on March 6, 2006. SFX promotes and produces motorcycle racing events known as Supercross. The racing events take place at various venues across the country in a "season" running from December through the following May and are broadcast live via the radio, television and internet (referred to as "audio webcasts"). SFX contends that Davis performs and displays audio webcasts of the racing events through his website, www.supercross.com, in violation of SFX's copyright in and to the audio webcasts. Specifically, SFX asserts that Davis "streams" the live webcast of the races on his website in "real time," which causes SFX irreparable harm by limiting its right to sell sponsorships or advertisement on its own website as the "exclusive source" of the webcasts. Plaintiff's Mot. for Prelim. Inj. at 5-6. Davis admits to providing an audio webcast "link" to the racing events on his website, and asserts an affirmative defense. Mot. to Quash at 1. Davis's Motion for Preliminary Injunction seeks to prohibit SFX from using the name "SupercrossLIVE," which Davis contends has been registered under the Trademark Act by his company, TripleClamps. SFX responds that Davis has presented no evidence that SFX has ever used "SupercrossLIVE" as

Re:I thought cases were decided on what the LAW is

[anethema]

I agree with you about 95 percent, but in this case I think the judge could have at least read the law being argued over and have seen that it has nothing to do with circumventing unencrypted access control.

mmmm interweb

[Anonymous Coward]

I see it like this..... think of your motocross bike, if you leave it out on the street with no lock, its gonna prolly get taken.
but if you put a lock on it/ lojack/ whatever, then it wont get taken as easily, but if someone wants it they will take it.

yes its not legal either way, but how many cops will work on the case where the bike was not locked, vs the case where it was locked/lojacked.

not so bad

[benicillin]

Lindsay ruled that: "SFX will likely suffer immediate and irreparable harm when the new racing season begins in mid-December 2006 if Davis is not enjoined from posting links to the live racing Webcasts.

really, this isn't so bad. its just a restraining order - not like the guy actually got fined or anything. i don't think this has very far reaching implications. i think the article is a little vague about whether the link was to a file or whether the link was embedded and showed his own ads around the videos. thats the important part, really.

Six degrees of separation

[matt me]

You're only six illegal hyperlinks away from Genghis Kahn.

doesn't this actually increase the visibility of

[MePhuq]

doesn't linking to someone's content actually increase their visibility thus creating MORE potential revenue for what they have to offer?

Content

[AaronDunlap]

I assert that this web publisher has created an attractive nuisance with his excellent content being posted "world-readable". He is obviously trying to entrap me into committing a questionable activity.

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Just remove the tag and paste the URL in. That's not a link then, its just a text URL

The judge is 100% right

[Tarmas]

It's *my* content and *I* decide what you're allowed to do with it.

Why the hell do you call the guys over at SFX greedy? They are running a company, they signed contracts and it's just a part of their way of making business. They are not a charity organization. I dare you to start your own business and try to make money off of it, beacuse, apparently, you have no idea how things work.

Sure, SFX should have made the access to the files harder, their bad, but by forgetting to lock my front door, am I inviting anyone in the neighborhood to come over while I'm away?

I'm really surprised that you got modded +3 Insightful, but there seem to be more commie freaks like you here.

Re:The judge is 100% right

[Sciros]

Nothing is being done *with* the content. It is merely being pointed to. In fact, they're not making money off the content, but off the ads surrounding it. That's why IMO it's such a slippery slope to make claims based on copyright ownership in this case.

To make personal attacks and claim I'd have no idea how to make money off my own business is just out of line, unfounded, and inaccurate to boot.

Easy Remedy

[blooba]

They had an easy remedy with the referrer and they failed to use it. The judge should have taken that into account.

Re:Easy Remedy

[mabu]

Referers DO NOT WORK.

Some anti-spyware blocks the sending of the referer which would restrict legit users.

Besides, it's super easy to hack around a referer restriction.

Simplying putting up "Copyright - all rights reserved" or other information is acceptable enough to let people who know how to read, that this content has restrictions that should be respected.

there seems to be a lot of confusion...

[larry bagina]

... about "deep linking" vs "linking".

To help clarify:

• deep linking :: linking
• deep dicking :: dicking

Re:I thought cases were decided on what the LAW is

[aeryn_sunn]

The fact remains, the judge did exactly what judges are supposed to do - he weighed up the arguments as they were presented to him

Actually, the perception I get is that the judge and/or his clerk are extremely lazy... as a former federal clerk, I can tell you we never just cursorily issued a ruling based on, for a lack of better terms, crappy briefs (arguments) by the parties. Sure, with this defendant, I would have had to have researched the law in a hell lot more depth and spent more time on it, but at the end of the day, however my judge would eventually rule, at least both parties could rest assured that we actually thoroughly researched the law and completely analyzed all the arguments.

From the sounds of the article, as said before, the judge issued the prelim injunction without even doing the proper research or thoroughly analyzing the Plaintiff's arguments. Of course, this is only a prelim injunction so at the very least, the case does not appear to have been settled on its merits. Plus, the article may be missing some key facts on what actually transpired.

But, the poster is incorrect, because judges are expected to do more than just "weigh the arguments as they are presented to him" because, even if "Ghengis Khan" is not an argument, this does not mean that the Plaintiff's arguments, no matter how cleverly worded and filled with sanctimonious legalspeak it may be, the argument would need to comport with caselaw and be thoroughly analyzed...and from this case, this particular ruling appears to flawed in light of the Ticketmaster ruling...

Judges should "become" experts in case law on whatever issue is before them and not rely only on the parties' briefs, because the parties may have interpreted the case law incorrectly, applying it incorrectly, or consciously omitting caselaw that teaches against the argument they trying to make. That is why the statement that "judges aren't expected to be case law experts" is patently incorrect.

anyway, I hold the philosophy that judges appointed for life and given anywhere between one to four law clerks should, in the name of justice, fairness...and karma:)..should issue rulings only when both arguments have been completely vetted against the most relevant and on-point caselaw, regardless if one party's arguments are completely moronic.

Re:I thought cases were decided on what the LAW is

[laughingcoyote]

I've heard there are these things called "books", some of which have a whole bunch of laws and precedents and all kinds of neat things like that in them. When a judge is hearing a case about a subject, I bet he could look at one of those, and see what the relevant law and caselaw is! In fact, I hear judges get legal secretaries that actually find out where to look for that type of thing, and the judge just reads it!

Judges are generally in specialized areas too. You generally don't see a judge hearing a felony-assault case one day and a personal-injury dispute the next. Given that, there's no excuse for a judge not knowing what the law is in h(is|er) area of expertise, and if information is needed from outside that area, I do imagine any competent judge knows someone who (s)he could ask, or can ask the legal secretary to look it up. Are you honestly saying that we shouldn't expect judges to be legal experts?

And if the law's progressed to the point that a judge, let alone an average person, cannot have a pretty good comprehension of it, there's something wrong. Now, sure, soon as the EFF gets involved, this idiocy will get overturned on appeal-if you want limited access to your content, here's an idea, put it behind a free, anonymous registration system, or even just require that a captcha be entered before the content will display. Judges generally require some degree of good faith on your part, some indication that you've genuinely tried to solve the problem and failed, and that going to court is your last resort. This person has made no effort whatsoever to utilize a technical rather than legal solution, and the judge should've recognized that. (If the other website was somehow "cracking" a password-registration system or deliberately circumventing the captcha, then and only then would there be an argument that someone is breaking into content which is not intended to be totally open to the public.)

Why is hot-linking so difficult to understand?

[CGameProgrammer]

I can't believe all the people that totally fail to understand what this case is about. It is not about linking to another site; it's about leeching. The host site had videos they collected and hosted and paid bandwidth for, and they want people to view those videos on their website so they might click an ad, compensating for the cost of hosting that video. Plus the user might want to browse around the rest of the site.

But the idiot here hot-linked to those videos from his website, meaning his visitors had no clue they were actually from another site, and the host site's bandwidth was being used up anyway.

The entire internet has not been made illegal because instances of hot-linking are quite rare since most people have learned better.